
Class. 
Book.. 



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61 



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Copyright }^°. 



CDBfRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



The HUMANITIES in the 
EDUCATION of the FUTURE 

AND OTHER ADDRESSES 
AND PAPERS 



BT 

WILLIAM BAXTER OWEN, Ph.D., Litt.D. 

Professor of the Latin Language and Literature 
in Lafayette College 




BOSTON 

SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY 

1912 






copyhight, 1912 
Sheeman^ French &= Compaity 



CCI,A330769 



PREFACE 

The addresses and papers that make up this 
volume have, with two or three exceptions ap- 
peared in print in various periodicals and publi- 
cations, and are now brought together in this 
more permanent form partly in recognition of 
the occasions on which they were delivered, and 
partly because of the steady and even increasing 
public interest in the topics discussed. The ad- 
dresses are educational, memorial, literary, post- 
prandial, chapel talks, — glimpses of college life 
on its better side ; in fact the atmosphere 
throughout is that of the college, and in par- 
ticular of the vigorous small college, to which 
we must still look for the most decisive and hope- 
ful influences in education. 

Easton, Pa. W. B. O. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I The Humanities in the Education op 

THE Future 1 

An Address Delivered at the 
Chambersburg Academy on its Cen- 
tennial Celebration. 

II The Value of Discipline in Educa- 
tion 17 

Delivered at the Commencement 
of Franklin and Marshall college. 

Ill Professional Study in College . . 32 

IV The Teaching of the Classics: Are 
WE Sacrificing the Humanistic to 

THE Linguistic? 38 

Read before the Ninth Annual 
Convention of the Association of 
Colleges and Preparatory Schools 
of the Middle States and Mary- 
land. 

V High School Training in its Bear- 
ing UPON Civic Integrity ... 49 
An Address before the Pennsyl- 
vania Educational Association. 

VI Efficiency the Aim of Education . 58 
Delivered at the Annual Banquet 
of the New York Alumni Associa- 
tion. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

VII Simplified Spelling 65 

An Address before the Anthro- 
pological Society of Washington, 
D. C, in a Symposium on the 
Question, "Is Simplified Spelling 
Feasible ?" 

VIII William Cassiday Cattell, D.D., 

LL.D 73 

Founders' Day Address. 

IX Professor Francis A. March, LL.D., 

L.H.D 86 

Memorial Address at Lafayette 
College. 

X Professor March . . .... 100 

Address at the Annual Banquet 
of the New York Alumni Associa- 
tion. 

XI Indelicacy in Literature . . .111 
XII Books to be Read before Graduation 122 

XIII College Fraternities 129 

Address before the Grand Chap- 
ter of the Zeta Psi Fraternity of 
North America, meeting at La- 
fayette College. 

XIV Town and Gown 137 

Contributed to the " Lafayette," 
on the Proposal that the Seniors 
wear Oxford Hats. 



XV 

XVI 

XVII 



XVIII 



XIX 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Easy Chair 143 

Some Freaks of College Sentiment 14-8 

What the Pews Require of the Pul- 
pit 154 

At a Dinner Given to the Lehigh 
Presbytery, Easton, Pa. 

Ezekiel's Watchman 158 

To the Y. M. C. A., with Special 
Reference to Students for the Min- 
istry. 

How Shall I Give thee up, Eph- 
RAIM? 164 

XX The Noise of them that Sing . .175 



THE HUMANITIES IN THE EDUCATION 
OF THE FUTURE 

A hundred years of life and growth means a 
good deal, but in an institution of this kind, chiefly 
it should mean a readiness to enter confidently 
upon a second century of its growth. To a single 
phase of this outlook and your readiness for it, 
I would briefly direct your thoughts. 

We hear much of the new education and of 
educational reforms as they apply to courses of 
liberal training; that the courses must be mod- 
ernized. I shall best exhibit the motive of these 
agitations by noting a few facts about the prog- 
ress of science in these days. In any general 
consideration of this progress we are at once con- 
fronted by three lines of remark: 1st, The In- 
crease of Knowledge; 2d, The Question of Its 
Dissemination, and 3d, The Question of Its Uses. 
— These lines of thought are familiar, but it is the 
educational corollary in which we are now con- 
cerned. 

First, as to the acquisition of new knowledge, 
the accumulation of the facts of nature, by scien- 
tific workers, the last fifty years has witnessed an 



2 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

amazing advance. It is enough for me to men- 
tion it. To enlarge upon it might well consume 
all my time and more. I pass then to say in 
the second place, that the acquisition of knowl- 
edge is enormously in advance of its distribution. 
This great fund of truth is known after all to 
but few— a mere handful of the race. It is at 
centers of learning, in the publications of learned 
societies, in the laboratories of workers. The 
highly educated classes are vastly in the minority, 
but even these cannot possibly go over the ground 
of the sciences, or do more than get the most 
general idea of them ; while as to the masses, it 
is literally true that primitive ignorance still 
clings to the skirts of culture, groveling under 
the very shadow of libraries and colleges. I am 
not speaking now of illiteracy, or of those forms 
of ignorance that are detected by school exami- 
nations. My point is, that if tests of another 
kind were applied — tests that would show the ad- 
justment of popular intelligence to the funda- 
mental truths of common life, masses of people 
would be found surprisingly ignorant of the 
world as it is known to science. The general 
intelligence is but dimly adjusted to the real 
truths of the world. To the masses the 
earth is still flat and motionless, the moon 
might as well be made of green cheese. To 
numbers larger than you would suppose this new 
knowledge of nature remains a sealed book. 
In the third place, the acquisition of knowledge 



HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 3 

is enormously in advance of its practical applica- 
tions. True, much has been done in the way of 
material progress — in mechanical appliances, in 
labor-saving and time-saving machines, in pro- 
gressive inventions and discoveries — so that Car-» 
lyle could say, "How have cunning workmen in 
all crafts, with their cunning head and right hand, 
turned the four elements to be their ministers, 
yoking the winds to their sea-chariot, making the 
very stars their nautical time-piece." And since 
Carlyle's time, what with steam and now this 
weird and nimble sister of the four elements — 
electricity — this progress has been a rare theme 
for the swelling periods of the orator. But this 
picture has another side. This progress is rela- 
tive and recent. Its benefits come to us in such 
questionable shape, with such obvious crudities 
and inequalities, that our condition now as com- 
pared with what would be possible were all that is 
known suitably applied, is as primitive rudeness 
to our present arts and industries. 

Of course we have to note, from this utilitarian 
point of view, that there is a vast amount of sci- 
entific investigation which has not as yet any 
practical outlook. There are vast areas of un- 
digested knowledge which have not yet emerged 
into the field of utility. Yet it remains true, as 
Bacon said, that all science should be a rich store- 
house for the glory of God and the relief of man's 
estate. All science. We have no right to assume 
that any branch, or any item of knowledge is use- 



4 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

less. Every serious inquiry into the principles 
and forces of nature may justly arouse the ex- 
pectation of benefit. We have also to note that 
the most complete control and use of natural law 
by man is at present in the simpler sciences, while 
the more difficult and complicated sciences promise 
the most valuable results. Astronomy is simple, 
but of slight practical use. Physics, somewhat 
more complicated and vastly more useful, for in 
this region of natural law all the mechanic arts 
spring up. Chemistry is still more complex, and 
here is a field of utility which is only now opening 
to us its untold treasures. Biology and sociology 
are complex in the highest degree. Organic life 
and growth, e. g., present immense difficulties, 
and their mastery will some day bring inestimable 
benefits to man. We can readily see how impor- 
tant and practical these fields of knowledge will 
be, when we remember how much we depend even 
upon our superficial pursuit of such arts as animal 
domestication, and that economic cultivation of 
plants which we call agriculture and horticulture. 
We are using physical forces very freely, and 
directing them scientifically; we are not giving 
scientific direction to vital, mental and social 
forces. The postponement of their application is 
due to obvious hindrances, among them this one 
which I now emphasize, viz: the meager dissemi- 
nation of the knowedge to the people at large. 

Then as to the mass of applied knowledge, even 
in the field of physics, the greater part of it is 



HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 5 

applied in so limited a way that the benefits are 
confined to comparatively few. Take so simple 
a matter as ventilation — what an advance we 
should have if all that scientific doctors know were 
universally applied I In the arts of life, where we 
get our comfort, and where our wants are sup- 
plied^ — in building, plumbing, farming, mining, 
cooking — we live and work on a plane far below 
what is possible in the present state of knowledge. 

Economic waste is appalling — not merely the 
waste of prodigal extravagance, or of ruinous 
competition, but the waste by fire, by flood, by 
forest denudation — some people know better; the 
masses do not. Then in matters far more serious 
and vital — in the matter of food — of biological 
laws involved in reproduction, of sanitation and 
the prevention of diseases — there are suggestions 
trembling on the lips of science which would be of 
vital importance to the world. 

This failure of science to relieve the needs of 
life is of course most conspicuous in the condition 
of the masses. In the English higher classes, 
e. g., 18 per cent, of infants die before reaching 
the age of five years ; in the lower classes 55 per 
cent! Death comes to all alike at some time, but 
hurries to the cabin and drags his slow approach 
to the palace as though he had lead in his heels. 
During the last few months 20,000,000 subjects 
of the richest empire on the globe have perished 
by starvation. Here, of course, we come up to 
the hard fact of social inequality. The poor 



6 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

cannot aiFord the products of skill and invention. 
Thej cannot even get the necessaries of life. But 
I am only speaking of the fact. The fact re- 
mains that the material benefits of progress are 
not diffused. While this very starvation has been 
dragging its horrors along, that very empire has 
expended, directly or indirectly, $100,000,000 
upon the pomp of a royal jubilee. We raise 
wheat — ^plenty of it — ^by improved methods, we 
grind it by improved machinery, we transport it 
by improved applications of motive power, and 
there is plenty of money to do all this — ^but there 
is the starvation and there is the jubilee. The 
material benefits of progress are not diffused. 
The further fact that their diffusion widens, not 
in proportion to the increase of knowledge, but as 
they tell us, in proportion to the increments of 
its dissemination suggests that this great riddle 
of suffering and social wrongs may yet meet with 
its solution in universal education. 

The logical conclusion of all this is of course, 
educate! Hasten the radiation of knowledge to 
the masses ! Bring science with its benediction 
to the masses. What we want is to rapidly as- 
similate the results of scientific research, and pass 
them on to the arts, to legislation, and to the 
molding of popular opinions and modes of 
thought. 

Of course, when we speak of the universal dif- 
fusion of all knowledge, we are talking in a way 
that is plainly visionary ; but while it is impossible 



HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 7 

that all men should know all things, there are cer- 
tam classes of natural knowledge, and, if you 
please, certain specific lines of information with 
which the welfare of society requires every indi- 
vidual to be familiar. 

It would also seem that we have advanced 
far enough to be able to give more definite form to 
our ideals of education, by determining what these 
general and particular classes of knowledge are. 
That would fix the ideal curriculum of school in- 
struction. Text-books should then be prepared 
by acknowledged masters in each department, 
methods of instruction should be sought that will 
secure the utmost thoroughness in the inculcation 
of cardinal principles, then such reforms as will 
facilitate the most wearisome processes of pri- 
mary education, and save time for other studies. 

I do not think that the motive underlying the 
appeal for modern education could be more fairly 
exhibited than in such an outline as I have given. 
Many of you have doubtless already noticed the 
fundamental error to which I now call your atten- 
tion, viz : that in this outline I have had in view 
but one phase of educational results — ^those look- 
ing toward material progress. This is the fatal 
error of those educational theories that are based 
upon the requirements of material growth. From 
that point of view education is chiefly, if not 
solely, the education of information, information 
about nature, the facts, laws and forces of nature. 
Not a word about the training of manhood. But 



8 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

one may have a world of information about na- 
ture, and yet be without skill or taste or tact, 
without judgment, without culture, without con- 
science, without character. There is a skill in 
doing that is good, a breadth of information that 
is good too, but the supreme trait that determines 
the quality of a civilization is what its men and 
women are, not what they know. The greatest 
truths and the greatest influences in the world are 
those which are above nature. The greatest 
factor in this world of ours is the human factor; 
and the humanities, so-called through all these 
twenty centuries, have to do with the intellectual, 
moral and spiritual life of the homo. 

Let me confirm this by the testimony of two 
witnesses whose authority will not be questioned. 
Dr. Samuel Johnson says : 

"The truth is^ that the knowledge of external na- 
ture, and the sciences which that knowledge requires 
or includes, are not the great or frequent business of 
the human mind. Whether we provide for action or 
conversation, whether we wish to be useful or pleasing, 
the first requisite is the religious and moral knowl- 
edge of right and wrong; the next is an acquaintance 
with the history of mankind, and with those examples 
which may be said to embody truth, and prove by 
events the reasonableness of opinions." 

And Professor Robert H. Thurston says: 

"The mission of science is the promotion of the wel- 



HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 9 

fare, material and spiritual, physical and intellectual 
of the human race . . . the use and the aim 
of scientific inquiry are to be sought in the region be- 
yond and above the material world to which those 
studies are confined." 

The master spirits even of science are contin- 
ually telling us that we must look up and away 
from the material trappings of our study. 

Experience furnishes as yet no alternative, and 
I see no escape from the conclusion that history, 
literature and the philosophies — mental and moral 
— must be heavily dra\\Ti upon to furnish the ma- 
terials of liberal education. I speak of literature 
as embodying the noblest part of human history — 
the thoughts of great and gifted men. I make 
no narrower distinction at present about the lan- 
guages, ancient or modem ; but the masterpieces 
as we have them in the world's best books, must 
remain the master instruments of an education 
that is to give liberal training. 

And now as to the value and uses of liberal 
education : it is one of the discouragements of col- 
lege work that the education we try to give there 
is felt to be of little use except for lawyers, doc- 
tors and preachers, and, perhaps, for teachers. 
As a matter of fact, however, the training a man 
has received tells to his advantage wherever he 
may be placed ; and even practical fitness for 
many kinds of work requires a broader basis of 
preparation than we are apt to suppose. Mr. 



10 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

Dana said that to report a prize fight, a spelling 
match or a ball game, he had rather have a fellow 
who has read the Ajax of Sophocles, who has read 
Tacitus, and can scan every ode of Horace, than 
one who has never had these advantages. That 
represents fitness for the most practical features 
of journalism. 

I would not turn away from the practical, but 
would take a still larger view of it, and insist that 
there is no duty or labor which we may be called 
upon to perform, into which we may not inject, as 
an element of our fitness for it, the utmost meas- 
ure of the manhood or womanhood that we pos- 
sess. Just as a teacher cannot teach too well, or 
a preacher preach too well, or a lawyer plead too 
well, so there is a sense in which the life and work 
of the carpenter, the engineer, the farmer and the 
trader, make drafts upon them which require bet- 
ter than their best. They cannot be too diligent, 
too persevering, too accurate, too sagacious, too 
manly. Did you ever know a man doing a work 
which required skill, which he did too skillfully? 
that required watchfulness in which he was too 
vigilant? that required fidelity in which he was 
too faithful? Now the higher training of good 
schools is to develop these very traits. 

Besides it is not simply a man's daily work; it 
is his equipment to meet as worthily as he can 
the various relations in which he must live — his 
relations in the family, his relations in the com- 
munity as neighbor and friend, his relations in 



HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 11 

the state as a citizen. In view of these many 
and varied relationships, what work a man can 
do is a fair question of course. But a greater 
one is, what kind of man is he? With what in- 
telligence and judgment to note and decide? with 
what capacities for growth in the graces of per- 
sonal life? with what spirit does he stand before 
tasks that require labor not only, but tact and 
patience? How does he stand in circumstances 
which test integrity? with what taste for the en- 
joyment of the beautiful? and with what capac- 
ities for the exercise of charity and benevolence 
toward others? 

Success, if we measure it by income and for- 
tune, is a paltry achievement in comparison with 
the better success measured on the scale of intel- 
ligence and character. 

I am well aware that the more delicate values 
of liberal education, unfortunately, cannot be ap- 
preciated by those who have not experienced them. 
That feeling of fellowship with the learned, the 
freedom to swing in the larger circle of great 
men's thinking, the constant expansion of the 
horizon of intelligence, the acquisition of the les- 
sons of history — the mores hommum, the play of 
the universal conscience in man, the convictions 
of our race — to know what qualities and what 
principles have been sovereign in human life; the 
scholar sets at a high value the freedom and in- 
sight which he gains in these directions, for they 
become a part of his mental furnishing. These 



12 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

lessons are stamped not upon the memory, but 
upon the man, upon character, determining 
not only capacity in various directions, but his 
tastes, and the quality and style of his thinking. 

Among the more obvious and appreciable bene- 
fits, besides that general intellectual training 
which gives tact and judgment, readiness and 
accuracy, there is the effect of this training in 
giving command of the mother tongue. Clearness 
of thought and facility and accuracy in expres- 
sion are the special gifts of linguistic study; nor 
can any exercise in English composition be equal 
to the discipline of transferring thought from 
language to language. Words must be so care- 
fully selected and weighed; there must be a new 
balance in the clauses to preserve emphasis if not 
idiom; shades of meaning must be recognized and 
transferred with all the delicacy and refinement 
which the student can command or acquire. 
Here is room for every shade of excellence, and 
the honest translator is from day to day making 
progress in ease and force and accuracy of ex- 
pression. 

And now, as ours should be a forward look, let 
me predict that the humanities in education will 
be not less, but more important in the coming 
century, and for the following very practical rea- 
son, in addition to the considerations already men- 
tioned, which give them a permanent value : The 
natural progress of scientific study to the more 
complex ranges of truth, will at length bring the 



HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 13 

interest of science itself into the region of hu- 
manism. I have already indicated in a general 
way this progress from the simpler to the more 
complex sciences — from physics to sociology. 
We have had centuries of empiricism mingled with 
more or less of superstition in every field — in 
physics, in chemistry, in biology, and in the arts, 
which are based upon these studies, in mining, in 
metallurgy, in medicine; we have now had about 
a century of science, truly so-called, with the em- 
phasis shifting upward in the scale, and now for 
thirty years pretty definitely placed upon biology. 
Many of you will remember that twenty-five years 
ago the attention of thinking men was concen- 
trated upon evolution, and that in its biological 
phases the descent of man was its culminating 
interest. This phase is passing, and already so- 
ciology looms big upon the horizon and sociology 
promises to be the great field for scientific re- 
search and experiment for the next few years, 
possibly for the next century. We shall study 
history and literature and philosophy and reli- 
gion as we never have studied them before, not 
for culture merely, but for the -facts, for scientific 
induction, to construct and confirm our theories 
of social order. We shall have, as in fact we al- 
ready have, an enormous amount of theorizing, 
of speculation and experiment upon finance and 
big business, taxation, the tariff, and upon the 
suggestions of socialism, but the practical out- 
come, beyond these measures that come as a re- 



14 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

suit of the swinging of the political pendulum 
from period to period, will be a more thorough 
and systematic study of the true social forces. 
We shall be doing in government what we have 
long been doing in physics, viz., using the forces 
of nature, directing them into channels of ad- 
vantage and working out by them results which 
can be definitely foreseen. Already many of our 
social problems are coming to the schools for their 
solution. It has long been so with problems turn- 
ing upon physics and chemistry, problems in 
manufacture, in agriculture, in transportation 
and the application of motive power; but now we 
are taking the temperance question to the schools ; 
the schools are contributing an important factor 
to the settlement of the woman question, by show- 
ing that women can teach as well as men and in 
many cases can learn better. The great problem 
of citizenship and fitness for the ballot depends 
for its solution upon what the schools are doing 
for men. 

Then in matters of economic theory and meas- 
ures of public policy, the universities and colleges 
are beginning to investigate and to inculcate doc- 
trine on their own account and college presidents 
and professors are becoming a factor in political 
issues. Half our college students in these days 
are diligent readers upon public questions, with 
opinions of their own, ample, original, refreshing, 
and, perhaps, the schools may yet show us how to 
deal with the trusts and with anarchy, how to 



HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 15 

settle the question of wages and rent and the 
deeper problems of industrial economy. I wish 
here to call your special attention to the fact that 
the center of scientific interest is advancing into 
this field where the materials are, in large part, 
to be derived from studies which we call the hu- 
manities. I do not mean merely the growth of 
the science of language. There are indications 
of the rise of a new and nobler enthusiasm for 
these studies, springing from the love of men. 
And when an enthusiasm for humanity shall su- 
persede this overwhelming enthusiasm for nature, 
when we study the social forces and the modes of 
applying them to secure the best results in the 
condition of men — as we now study the facts and 
forces of nature — we shall find that the products 
of human thought, and the history of human in- 
stitutions have a value which as yet even the 
wisest have but suspected. 

We may improve our methods of study, our 
methods of teaching. That we have been doing 
all along, so that classical study is not what it 
was three hundred years ago, or even what it was 
fifty years ago ; we may adapt our studies to these 
new purposes, discarding whatever is useless, 
whatever is dead and moldy ; though it is a grow- 
ing surprise to me — the modernness of the ancient 
thinkers, the practical value of their thoughts 
and experiences, the pertinence of their insight. 
A hand-book for lawyers not only, but one for 
merchants might well be made up from the pages 



16 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

of Cicero. But if for educational purposes Bacon 
is better than Cicero, if Boileau and Dr. Johnson 
are better than Horace and Juvenal, if Dante 
and Goethe are better than Homer and Euripides, 
if John Stuart Mill is better than Aristotle, we 
can easily make that exchange. It will only be 
replacing a book by a better book; but the study 
of man — that we must have — the best in man. 
Not his bones, not his muscles, not even the tis- 
sues of his nerves and brain, or the measurement 
of his facial angle, interesting as that is, but the 
knowledge of what he does and says, his wisdom^ 
the supreme flights of his masterly thinking. 



II 



THE VALUE OF DISCIPLINE IN 
EDUCATION 

I bring words of hearty greeting to Franklin 
and Marshall College as one of the strongholds 
of sound liberal training — progressive certainly, 
with free and ready adjustment to new condi- 
tions, but in these adjustments, not yielding so 
much to the demand, e. g., for vocational studies 
as to thwart the main purposes of liberal train- 
ing. Colleges that have done that are now find- 
ing that they must come back ; Franklin and 
Marshall need take no backward step. 

We do not object to the word "practical" if 
it is used in its larger meanings, but to "com- 
mercialize" — if that term may be applied to our 
tendencies in education, we can hardly resist the 
impression of debasement, for in education we are 
dealing with the human spirit. "Standardize" is 
a good word, newly applied, and has an exact 
and scientific ring, but if it is intended to suggest 
to us an exact analogy between processes of edu- 
cation in a college and processes of manufacture 
in a mill, where your raw material is put in and 

your finished product comes out; and if there is 

17 



18 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

to be a strict commercial accounting of hours of 
study, of recitation, and of lecture, and an eco- 
nomic scrutiny of the use of floor space and all 
appliances, so that the ledger wiU show for every 
dollar of expenditure a dollar of return and a 
little more for profit, then that use of "standard- 
ization" win somewhat rasp our finer sensibilities 
— mainly because in education we are dealing with 
values which do not yield themselves to measure- 
ment on the scale of dollars. 

I hope I do not caricature that very able and 
thoughtful document. Bulletin No. 5 of the Car- 
negie Foundation for the Advancement of Edu- 
cation. I do not mean to misrepresent it; but 
the very terms in which the idea is expressed are 
such that the statement of the analogy sounds 
like caricature. Raw material, e. g., what is it in 
this "industry" of education but the members of 
the Freshman class? Should we so designate 
them in the serious language of science? The 
flippant Sophomore may so name them, and they 
must endure it I suppose; but they do so with a 
shrug of resentment even in that case. Then 
"finished product." Your graduating Senior, 
now becoming keenly aware that instead of being 
"finished" he is only ready to begin, will blush 
at the phrase and wonder whether it is science or 
satire. 

In mere knowledge very likely we are on the 
lowest level of educational results, and even knowl- 
edge, while we can test the possessor of it by ex- 



DISCIPLINE IN EDUCATION 19 

aminations, we cannot make any inventory of its 
value in terms of dollars. 

Knowledge of course is important, but rela- 
tively the least important element of education. 

"Knowledge is power" we say, but we know 
very well that it is not power unless under special 
conditions. 

When it comes to that point where it utilizes 
the forces of nature, and masters the conditions 
of supplying the needs of life, we may call it 
power ; when in the processes of its handling there 
emerges some kind of capacity, then it is power ; 
when it reaches that point where it can be trans- 
muted into character, then it is power ; but the 
mere knowledge of facts as a personal accomplish- 
ment is not power, and has in itself little value 
of any kind. 

Now this passing of knowledge into something 
finer by means of reflection, experience, the fa- 
miliar handling of knowledge under circumstances 
such that it will yield up its best fruits — this 
transmutation of mere knowledge into discern- 
ment, accuracy, judgment, prudence, wisdom — 
shrewdness, duplicity, knavery, etc., is what 
chiefly concerns us in education. We note differ- 
ences here. To take a single contrast — wisdom — 
shrewdness. Wisdom — that lifts a man to larger 
outlook in life, ennobling his whole nature, quali- 
fying him therefore to choose ends that may be 
pursued with safety and honor. Shrewdness — 
the keen edge of expediency to note advantages 



20 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

under given circumstances, with sharp outlook for 
the main chance, and that qualifies a man there- 
fore to devise means to any end, however wisely 
or unwisely that end may have been chosen. 
Your shrewd man may pervert the good and play 
tricks with conscience and with motives. You 
cannot trust him to apply your preachments of 
righteousness and mercy. He will apply every 
precept so as to place the duty on the other man 
and the benefit upon himself. Incidentally here, 
it were well to have knowledge ripen toward wis- 
dom rather than toward shrewdness. 

Then there are processes in the getting 
and handling of knowledge that give practice 
in thinking and growth in that power. But 
here we are in regions where the ad- 
vances of growth are not visible. If a 
man gain ten pounds avoirdupois, the scales 
will show that to the minutest fraction of an 
ounce, but there are no visible units of thought 
growth, or any tangible units in the texture of 
character, of whose increase one is immediately 
aware. A lad may pass an hour or two, under 
instruction, in learning how to adjust some deli- 
cate instrument, as a theodolite or a microscope; 
and may easily see in that manipulation his rapid 
advance in skill of eye and hand; but, in the 
knowledge and the exercises that give discipline 
of intelligence, and that deepen moral conviction, 
the results are such as not to be immediately ob- 
vious. The man with the scales can detect no dif- 



DISCIPLINE IN EDUCATION 21 

ference. The man with the ledger will be puzzled 
to know how much credit to give, or whether he 
shall give any. 

The student himself will be ten years in finding 
out what the study of Socrates in a certain class- 
room contributed to his moral fiber, and may be 
still longer in realizing the value to him, in the 
development of effective thinking, of his work in 
Trigonometry and in Cicero. After a long time 
he will begin to see it, and may go back at some 
commencement season and teU his Professor that 
such work was the most valuable part of his edu- 
cation, though at the time it seemed to him useless 
and irksome. 

The education of the utilities has therefore 
popularly an enormous advantage over the edu- 
cation of culture because it presents practical and 
obvious values. Culture is the refinement of in- 
telligence. It will not be overlooked by the care- 
ful educator, though it may easily be overlooked 
by throngs of students. 

If then there be a great rush to vocational and 
utilitarian studies, on the part of those who might 
have and should have a broader training for their 
work, that does not prove the superior value of 
vocational studies ; it only suggests a possible 
lack of insight and mature judgment on the part 
of those who so choose. 

These considerations throw a welcome light on 
the subject of free electives. That a boy may 
study what he pleases in coUege suggests a peril- 



22 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

ous extreme. Suppose it should please him to 
study nothing ! You may have noticed that logic 
has a quaint habit of playing tricks when thus 
pushed to extremes. 

Peace! The world sighs for it, prays for it, 
groans under the horrors and the burdens of war- 
fare. How then shall we have peace.? Why, 
build war ships so big, make cannon so mighty, 
projectiles so irresistible, make defensive armor so 
impenetrable, maintain armies in every nation so 
large and ready that war will be impossible ! 

If one bathe once a year, one is clean at long 
intervals ; once a week, one is clean much oftener ; 
every day, twice a day, clean all the time. Then 
the trick — if one is clean all the time why need 
one bathe at all? 

Of the many reasons against free election, that 
against its principle and working should be suf- 
ficient — ^the liability to error in precocious spe- 
cialization, subjects if left to the personal choice 
of students being so often selected upon grounds 
of superficial or even capricious interest. It is 
more important to know what a boy needs in edu- 
cation than what he likes, and what he needs is 
more likely to be thoroughly understood by those 
who have insight and experience and an enduring 
earnestness and sincerity in the work of educa- 
tion. 

What he really needs is discipline of thought. 
Note two or three elementary stages of this disci- 
pline — very simply, without any garnishing of 



DISCIPLINE IN EDUCATION 23 

psychological or pedagogical technicalities — ^first 
to promote readiness of thought, ease and speed 
in its common movements. Not whimsical, invol- 
untary thinking; that accomplishes so little. 
What we must have is consecutive thinking under 
the control of the will. 

To hold in check the capricious impulses of 
thought — to keep it active and also to hold the 
currents of it in definite channels — this is one of 
the supreme values of school work, cultivating 
the power of attention, habits of study, accom- 
plished by personal supervision, but also and 
mainly through class drill, making thought obedi- 
ent to the call of questions. 

A class, say, of fifteen pupils, plied with rapid 
questions for thirty minutes, a hundred questions 
within that time — perhaps twice that many, for 
they are easy, the easier the better, for the pur^ 
pose is not to test knowledge but to train 
thought; and the ideal situation is that every 
pupil will answer every question, not knowing 
who will be called upon to answer it aloud. 

Second, promptness in certain processes of ex- 
act reasoning. This we get in the mathematics, 
from mental Arithmetic to the Calculus. Third, 
accuracy in the observation of simple facts — to 
let simple facts lie clear and true upon the mind 
as they may lie upon the eye. Fourth, coming to 
correct conclusions from facts. This involves not 
only clear perception of the facts, but also the 
recognition of their relations to each other. 



24 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

This is reasoning, a valuable quality. Without 
it we make mistakes and are failures. Indeed 
life's failures come mainly from this source. Cer- 
tainly there are other failures — moral failures, 
that strew the ways of life with wrecks that chal- 
lenge our tears. Of these we do not now speak, 
but rather of our failure to do our common work. 
This comes from two sources — lack of force, which 
we often mistakenly call laziness, and lack of 
judgment. 

Here we are distinctly within the realm of the 
practical. In this gift of judgment we touch th^ 
highest form of intellectual endowment. The 
man, who, in any given situation knows just what 
to do is the man of the hour. The man, who, in 
any difficult situation can instantly solve the situ- 
ation by a stroke of insight that goes straight 
to its heart is the great man — in invention Edi- 
son, in finance Morgan, in war and state craft 
Julius Caesar. 

These are eminent instances, but the quality of 
which we are speaking is universally valuable 
through all the grades of work — the maid in your 
kitchen wants it, your builder, your teamster — as 
much in his sphere as the president of your bank 
or the governor of your state, and the work is 
as fatally vitiated by its absence in the one case 
as in the other. 

I am of course, well aware that the school can- 
not impart judgment; that at its foundation is 
mother wit, that fundamental stuff in men which 



DISCIPLINE IN EDUCATION 25 

we call natural ability. But the school can help 
in two ways : It opens to us a large fund of 
recorded experience. Eight or ten years of 
school life gives us some sort of access to the ex- 
perience of three or four thousand years, and 
what we know about life, and how to do things 
comes to us largely in this way. 

But chiefly, the school helps in the development 
of such natural gifts as we may have. Without 
development they will be of little use, so the school 
undertakes to guide and train us in judgment — 
by various methods doubtless and on various sub- 
jects, but I wish to emphasize the value of that 
training which comes from dealing with thoughts 
rather than with things. 

Reason must grow upon its own product — that 
which expresses thought. In language we have 
the very implements of reason, and to learn its 
free use we must make ourselves masters of the 
processes of speech because these are the imple- 
ments of reason. 

We can hardly overestimate the value of lan- 
guage study in promoting growth in intelligence. 
Our earliest efforts in thinking are determined 
by the meanings which we gradually learn to at- 
tach to the words that we hear. We widen our 
thinking by getting new words and by going 
deeper into the significance of those we know. 
From first to last we are led on in pathways that 
are marked out by speech. In school or out of 
school we are drawing upon the wealth which has 



26 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

accumulated in speech. Our very words are 
charged with a kind of vitality — with the heart 
and thinking of the men who have used them. 
When a nation has been speaking and writing and 
printing a word for centuries, coloring it with the 
events of their public and personal life, expressing 
by it their temper, their courtesy, the results of 
their thinking, pouring into it their convictions 
and their passions — ^you can easily see what a 
delicate and marvelous instrument we may have 
in a common word, as Shakespeare or Milton or 
Webster or Lincoln may use it. It should be the 
purpose of educational training to bring us into 
the fullest possible control of this stored-up 
wealth. 

So far on the side of facts, regarding words 
as facts. 

Then the handling of the elements of speech in 
their relations is an exercise of great value in 
the development of intelligence. The elements of 
speech are the implements of reason, and the proc- 
esses of speech are the methods of reason ; so it 
is the patient handling of these elements in their 
relations that develops reasoning power. It is 
by working upon sentences, getting their mean- 
ing, and exercises in their formation, that the 
crude insights of the untrained mind are brought 
forward to something like sagacity. 

This seems so elementary that one hesitates to 
speak of it in such a presence as this ; yet in such 
a presence as this it is likely to be best understood 



DISCIPLINE IN EDUCATION 27 

that what most boys and girls need on entering 
college is the power to grasp clearly the meaning 
of a paragraph of classic text. 

The relations of words in a clause, or of clauses 
to each other are not arbitrary or accidental, but 
are the essential relations of logic; so that in 
dealing with them day in and day out, through 
much of our school life, we get the habit of trac- 
ing relationship and the instinct of feeling it. 
This habit and this instinct lie at the foundations 
of reasoning power. These give readiness and 
ripeness to the mind liberally trained. 

I have no occasion at present to insist upon 
the use of the ancient classics as the master ma- 
terials of liberal training. Many do so insist, 
and under other circumstances I might have some- 
thing to say in that direction; but let me here 
admit that, except for convenience, better appli- 
ances and immemorial habit in education, the an- 
cient languages have no monopoly of disciplinary 
value over the modern ; but the best illustration 
of our present point will be found in a language 
that is at least foreign. 

Note the progress of a boy in mastering a new 
sentence in Goethe or Cicero from the time when 
it is almost a blank to the time when its meaning 
is clear to him. He must give each word its 
proper meaning; must fit words to each other 
which are in the sentence remote ; must see differ- 
ences between forms that look alike — often resting 
a decision upon a minute distinction. 



28 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

The dictionary may give a dozen meanings for 
some word, and that will open new vistas of sug- 
gestion and probability into which he must boldly 
walk and weigh conflicting claims. He must con- 
stantly revise previous impressions in the light 
of fuller knowledge. The main purpose of all 
this, in the stage of which I am speaking, is dis- 
ciplinary, viz, to cultivate those very activities of 
reason whose supreme value is put to the test in 
every emergency of life and work. I need not 
delay you to go through the steps in detail, but 
only to remind you that in every step of the proc- 
ess he has been grouping facts and forming judg- 
ments from their relations — in a crude and halt- 
ing way of course, but he does better and better 
as he goes on. There is material here for proc- 
esses that develop the finest judgment, just as in 
translation there is room for the best that the 
best can give — discernment, precision, delicacy of 
insight, felicity of phrase. 

Unconscious growth in the interpreting intel- 
ligence is the fruit of this drill. It ripens 
through familiarity with linguistic essentials, but 
the real gain is in the keen insights of intelligence, 
in memory, readiness, accuracy, and in the 
breadth and alertness of mental action. 

The time is too brief for me to dwell upon the 
valuable elements of training derived from the 
study of science. I had almost said equally valu- 
able, but it is different. There is manipulation 
and experiment, and these make knowledge more 



DISCIPLINE IN EDUCATION 29 

definite and more permanent. There is training 
of the eye and hand as well as of the mind; and 
at times great use and culture of the imagination. 
Still we make little gain here in the growth of 
discriminating thought — in the development of 
the interpreting intelligence. 

If we pass now from the quality of discipline 
to the quality of the truth acquired, we shall find 
that the claims of science cannot be passed over 
so lightly. Science opens to us the world of na- 
ture and we rise to the apprehension of it in pro- 
portion to our own powers of expanding thought. 

The objects we study draw us on by all de- 
grees of interest — on every hand the unknown and 
its challenge to the instinct of investigation, ob- 
jects curious, useful, objects beautiful and 
wonderful. In mathematics not only, but in the 
study of types and laws and adaptations in 
nature, men seem to swing out into the in- 
spiring task of tracing the very thoughts 
of God! How time is lengthened for us when we 
begin to realize the duration of geologic ages! 
How space deepens when we observe a star that 
presents no parallax in all the wide swing of our 
annual motion! 

It would seem to fall in Avith such a course, if, 
so far as general education is concerned, students 
were brought forward rapidly to the results of 
scientific research, with only enough of the ele- 
mentary manipulation and experiment to make 
these results intelligible. Some of the sciences 



30 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

should be represented in the required part of a 
Hberal course, not with exhaustive and technical 
study of detail, but with adequate introduction 
and then freedom to range among the educating 
ideas of science. 

The specialist, of course, must go "further — for 
purposes of research, for teaching, and for the 
purposes of application to the utilities of life. 

But I speak now for the majorities of average 
men, and insist upon the educational rather than 
the practical values of science. Fortunately the 
masses of men may avail themselves of these prac- 
tical benefits without knowing much about the 
sciences, just as we may breathe the air without 
knowing of its constituent gases, or be nourished 
by our dinner without knowing anything about 
Dr. Wiley's analysis of the foods, or anything sci- 
entifically about the processes of nutrition. One 
man can build a bridge if he be a competent en- 
gineer, millions of men may cross it without be- 
ing engineers at all. 

Far otherwise is it with culture, with character, 
and the ideals of life. Every man must get these 
for himself or go without them. Elevating 
thoughts are of no use to us until they have passed 
into the processes of our own thinking. And so 
we enter the glorious realm of humane interests — 
the record of human achievement full of inspira- 
tion and power; the noble thoughts of great 
thinkers, living truths wrought out of human ex- 
perience, and all shaped into beautiful expressions 



DISCIPLINE IN EDUCATION 31 

under the creative imagination of gifted men — the 
humanities, indeed, the inspiration and the nutri- 
ment of living souls. 

To this inheritance our general courses should 
introduce students. We should lift them toward 
the level of these thinkers — not for selfish refine- 
ment, but for the symmetrical dvelopment of the 
whole mind and nature. Refinement indeed it is, 
but refinement of power, refinement of discrimina- 
tion in matters of thought and judgment and 
taste, of faith and morals, of every interest which 
the student's larger life may compass. 



in 

PROFESSIONAL STUDY IN COLLEGE 

The influence of ennobling study, not only to 
develop the capacity to do better work, but to 
promote a readiness to hear the higher calls of 
duty, suggests the question whether we are not, in 
our American colleges, in some danger of yield- 
ing up the liberal courses too far to the practical 
demands of special professional needs; and 
whether, therefore, we are not to be congratulated 
that so many institutions of high standing have 
been slow to yield to these demands. 

Dr. Parkhurst, in a recent article on this sub- 
ject, speaking of the criticism of liberal educa- 
tion, "prompted by the utilitarian spirit," says : 

"It is a sad pity that our college authorities are to 
such a degree succumbing to this shallow skepticism, 
and that they are so largely allowing the idea that a 
college is an institution for thie comprehensive up- 
building of a man, to be replaced by the idea that it 
is a sort of whetting shop where dull steel can be 
ground to an edge, or a kind of cabinet shop where un- 
shaped timber can be worked down and fitted to a par- 
ticular niche in the business of life." 

Lay broad and deep the foundations. We all 

32 



PROFESSIONAL STUDY 33 

recognize the need of that — foundations of intel- 
lectual capacity, of knowledge and of training; 
but the foundations are necessarily narrowed a 
little if the student begins early to trim off some 
studies and select others that have or seem to have 
a more direct bearing on what he proposes to do 
in the world. 

There may be some compensation in a gain in 
fitness for special work; but the power to do spe- 
cific things however well, forms the least impor- 
tant part of a professional man's career. For 
the right use even of his professional skiU, he re- 
quires knowledge, broad training and those ele- 
ments of general intelligence and character, which 
qualify him to think well and act well under many 
circumstances where his special skill would be of 
little avail. 

Besides, in narrowing the lines of preliminary 
study, we are throwing back upon academic years 
the conditions of practical life, and are in some 
danger of lowering our standards. In the region 
of the practical, men are always subject to a 
pressure forcing them down to the level of the mo- 
tives of common business. We yield only too read- 
ily to that pressure, some more quickly and more 
completely than others, but on the whole in busi- 
ness the commercial motive determines the moral 
level. 

The liberal courses of our colleges should give 
young men a stronger and a deeper hold upon 
wholesome moral convictions. What the world of 



34 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

business needs, so far as educated men are con- 
cerned, is, not that they cultivate earlier the apti- 
tudes of competitive business, and thus earlier di- 
rect their energies into the channels of self-seek- 
ing; but that they come to their work, if later, 
then the better qualified to cherish true and strong 
ideals of manly living, and to impart a leaven of 
moral earnestness to the associations of later 
years. 

We should keep the period of education as free 
as possible from any mere commercial influence, 
and as sensitive as possible to those elevating 
forces which come from noble estimates of life. 

Such estimates we derive from the examples and 
thoughts of great and gifted men. They speak 
to us in literature. The masterpieces of litera- 
ture are perennial fountains of inspiration in the 
essentials of manliness, and must be the master 
instruments of liberal education. 

To such influences youth quickly responds. 
"Heaven lies about us in our infancy," says the 
poet, and that divine radiance still lingers about 
the growing boy ; but there comes a time when the 
blood cools, and the mature man sees the celestial 
glory "fade into the light of common day." And 
that is well so far as it is mere buoyancy of life; 
but so far as this spirit of youth results from the 
vividness of moral impressions, so far as his work 
is ideal in this — that it is to lie within the lines 
of certain great principles as integrity, fidelty to 
trust, self-sacrifice, so far as the glow that is put 



PROFESSIONAL STUDY 35 

upon the future comes from a heart on fire with 
the inspiration of these principles, this spirit 
ought not to be quenched. Rather the man should 
be more earnest than the boy, his zeal and en- 
thusiasm tempered with the strength of added 
years. 

It is exactly here in one important respect that 
broad educational foundations have their supreme 
value, viz: in giving solidity and permanence to 
the convictions of youth ; and here, therefore, that 
the specializing process in collegiate study will 
surely be found to be short-sighted. 

Perhaps the case would appear stronger if it 
could be said that even for money-making the 
broadly educated man has, in the long run, the 
advantage over the specialist ; and perhaps this 
might be truly said, but I prefer to take the 
higher ground that the obligations that are upon 
us to do good and true work do not rest upon the 
money-getting motive. 

Eminence in professional life involves other ele- 
ments of success than such as are measured on 
the scale of income. The educated man above all 
others should be the one to appreciate this fact 
and to know that while there are business aspects 
of work in any profession, they are of least im- 
portance in determining a man's rank and influ- 
ence, whether in his professional work or in the 
many relations which he must sustain in the com- 
munity, as citizen, brother, neighbor and friend. 

The relief of suff'ering and the elevation of hu- 



36 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

man life are ends which bring all workers to one 
common ground, whatever their several voca- 
tions ; and they are ends to secure which in any 
degree we must mainly depend upon those who 
work in the professions. Their success must, 
therefore, be measured on the scale of their service 
in these directions. 

In journalism, if you were looking for the daily 
papers and the periodicals that do most to pro- 
mote sound intelligence, and that exert the most 
wholesome influence on home life and public senti- 
ment and public morals, you would hardly select 
those that are making the most money. The 
same is emphatically true of teaching and of 
preaching; it is true also of authorship. The 
best books and those that have done the most good 
are not the ones that have brought the largest 
financial returns. Nor is this less true surely in 
medicine and the law. 

In short there is no element either of intelligence 
or of righteousness which a man may sacrifice for 
money-making and not subject himself to the criti- 
cism of having made a bad bargain, his own criti- 
cism: last of all and keenest of all. 

It is true, a course of study in literature, phi- 
losophy, history, science and mathematics, may not 
in every case produce the results in intelligence 
and manhood which we are here contemplating, 
for there are shallow and selfish men among those 
who have passed through college courses as well 
as among those who have not ; but such studies 



PROFESSIONAL STUDY 37 

faithfully pursued should promote and do ordi- 
narily promote breadth of intelligence and depth 
of character. The atmosphere which such studies 
create should be favorable to wholesome and last- 
ing convictions. The time so spent is by no means 
wasted, for these studies bring many rewards. 
The one which we are here chiefly considering, 
however, is that they furnish a remedy for that 
narrowness of thought and life, and that shallow- 
ness of professional purpose of which we see so 
many instances. 



IV 

THE TEACHING OF THE CLASSICS 

AEE WE SACRIFICING THE HUMANISTIC TO THE 
I.INGUISTIC ? 

Some difficulty will be felt by those of us who 
are not thoroughly acquainted with the methods 
of pursuing the classics in use in the various in- 
stitutions. Some indication as to the subjects 
upon which linguistic investigators are working 
may be derived from their publications in the 
Journal of Philology, the Classical Review, their 
pamphlets, and the papers they read in the Philo- 
logical Association and other kindred societies. 
Judging from these, we get the impression that 
the aim of classical study is an exhaustive pursuit 
of certain minute and special lines of linguistic 
investigation. The field is full of busy searchers, 
intent and eager, turning over every old page and 
every monument of antiquity that contains even 
a fragment of a record of human speech, in the 
hope of finding some new piece of evidence on 
syntax, accent, or some phase of formal criticism. 
For such purposes, and with a view to the op- 
portunities it may offer for original work, a text 

38 



TEACHING OF THE CLASSICS 39 

will often be valuable in proportion to its obscurity 
and its real insignificance. The Saturnian verses 
of Naevius are better than the letters of Horace 
or the moral essays of Cicero. Such study is car- 
ried to amazing heights of specialization and cer- 
tainly has its charms, no doubt also its uses, though 
it can hardly be regarded as very productive if we 
have in mind the culture of the humanities, or those 
practical results bearing upon human progress, of 
which scholarship should never lose sight. Such 
pursuits, however, do not, I presume, fairly rep- 
resent the work of the class-room. The glimpse 
I have had of the seminar in elective and post- 
graduate classes in some of our institutions, would 
suggest that a taste for this kind of linguistic 
work is cultivated. Most attention is given 
to the critical side of exegesis, in which respect 
the seminar has apparently undergone a remark- 
able change as compared with the model of its 
great originator, Wolf, who gathered about him 
groups of enthusiastic students, and with the 
straightforward procedure of a clear-eyed mas- 
ter, took them over sentences word by word, 
sounding every depth of meaning, and bringing 
to bear out of the stores of his own knowledge 
weightier matters connected with the larger prin- 
ciples of grammar and the philosophy of speech. 
This was as it should be. 

As most students are prepared, we have to de- 
vote a good deal of the first year or two to the 
linguistic side. It must be drill, severe and hard. 



40 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

and all must go through it. It is to promote fa- 
miliarity with the linguistic essentials, to develop 
quickness of memory, readiness, accuracy, insight 
and alertness of mental action. It must not, of 
course, be carried on mechanically or without 
proper discrimination. One student is sensitive 
and must be dealt with delicately ; another is dif- 
fident, and must have confidence imparted to him; 
another is slow and must be handled with some 
patience; another gets into an ungoverned haste, 
and must be taught to reflect, and be sure of these 
little items of knowledge. Apart from these and 
similar diflPerences, I can see no significance in 
what the advocates of the "new education" are 
urging about the diff'erentiation of pupils on the 
basis of psychology. No refinement of psycholog- 
ical analysis you can apply to the pupil can make 
anything but Latin out of the Latin. The Latin 
is there. It is sentences made up of words that 
are declined and conjugated and put together syn- 
tactically. Its elements must be mastered, and 
the linguistic drill here proposed is good for all. 
A portion of each session should be devoted to 
the repeated application of the grammar to the 
text read — pronunciation and meters, and in con- 
nection with both these, quantity; sounds and 
euphonic changes ; noun stems and declension ; 
verb stems and conjugation ; the formation and 
derivation of words, and syntax all the time — this 
makes a good outline of work for two years. It 
may, however, be much shortened so far as the 



TEACHING OF THE CLASSICS M 

drill is concerned if students are well prepared for 
college. During this time — longer or shorter^ — 
a good deal of text will have been gone over; and 
a good many linguistic principles made familiar 
and enforced. 

In the meantime, further valuable results may 
be reached, in three distinct lines, viz, — carrying 
forward the mastery of the language as an instru- 
ment of thought, so that the student and the 
author may come together with as little hindrance 
as possible ; secondly, cultivating accuracy and 
habits of investigation, and dealing with linguistic 
details by processes of observation and reasoning 
that will develop the scientific habit of mind ; and 
thirdly, that cultivation in general which litera- 
ture imparts, awakening the susceptibility to its 
humanizing influence. The student is all the time 
broadening the way to a better knowledge of the 
mental and spiritual life of the people whose lit- 
erature he is reading. Later collegiate work in the 
class-room may aim more exclusively at results 
in these three directions, or, if you please mainly 
at the last, cvlture. Even in this case, however, 
there will be an advantage so far as method is 
concerned, in dealing with details, in giving a close 
and careful scrutiny to words, — not only their ar- 
rangement, for emphasis and rhythm, not only the 
allusions, figures of speech, etc., that may be 
found in them, but the shades of meaning with 
which they are used. Careful discrimination in 
this matter is one of the most valuable gifts of 



42 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

classical study; students are ordinarily so apt to 
pass over words with a vague and imperfect idea 
of their meaning. This difficulty confronts teach- 
ers of English most of all. I remember a paper 
on the study of English read before this associa- 
tion some years ago, by Professor March, in 
which, speaking of the talk about reading Latin 
and Greek as we do English, he said, "There 
ought to be more talk about learning to read Eng- 
lish as we do Greek." 

It should be said further that in the study of 
grammatical elements there may be a gradation 
of quality such as to adapt it to the capacity of 
the most advanced students, leading up, in fact, 
to the profoundest and most important questions 
of linguistic science. Euphonic laws, for ex- 
ample, may be based on the physiology of speech ; 
the study of nouns, adjectives and verbs may lead 
on to the origin and history of declension and con- 
jugation; it is a further and legitimate pursuit 
of syntax to base the rules on principles of 
thought ; then it is an advanced phase of rhetorical 
and historical interpretation to apply the ma- 
turer scholarly judgment to a text and determine 
its authenticity — the ripest and noblest fruits of 
study. 

Such criticism has its gesthetic as well as its 
doctrinal and formal side — a point to be noted in 
connection with the pursuit of classic literature 
for its humanizing influence. In every stage of 
study in the classics we should be awake to im- 



TEACHING OF THE CLASSICS 43 

pressions of the beautiful and teach students to be 
so. This process has its difficulties. To subject 
any work of art to that analytic treatment which 
brings the elements of its beauty to light and 
makes them appreciable as elements of beauty is 
no easy task; partly, perhaps, because there is no 
theory of beauty upon which we are agreed, by 
the application of which, such analytic treatment 
may be realized. 

Probably it will often be best not to make any 
parade of a special aesthetic purpose, for we are 
on delicate ground. When we talk of beauty, un- 
less the boys and girls comprehend us, we shall 
seem to them like stilted and affected triflers. 

Real art may generally be depended upon to 
make itself felt, and to exert a silent influence by 
its own inherent power. By coming again and 
again under the influence of this power, we rise 
in cultivation to be intelligent lovers of the beau- 
tiful. We look at a great statue or a great pic- 
ture, or a landscape, or a fine building with in- 
creasing pleasure, if we look often ; so with a 
poem, a play, or an oration. In literature, how- 
ever, we do not get our impressions of the whole 
by a simple look, but by reading or hearing, which 
takes time ; and if there is some disadvantage in 
this, there is also, something gained in intelligence 
and thoroughness, for we have leisure to apply 
such analytic tests as we have at command. The 
artist builds stroke by stroke. Each trait has 
its place and its significance, and we must take 



44 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

them in as he puts them on. There is a beauty of 
diction, for example, the more appreciated as the 
fund of knowledge about words increases ; clever 
combinations which, as Horace says, make old and 
familiar words seem new; there are beautiful 
tropes ; there is a beauty of arrangement, a beauty 
of rhythm, a fitness of action, if it is narrative or 
dramatic, a beauty of imagery, a beauty of 
thought. A short passage, in fact, may be a 
work of art in itself and may be separately studied 
as such. 

The Tiberius of Tacitus is a "miracle of art," 
says Lord Macaulay, but it is a miracle of art 
whose beauties as a whole are hardly within the 
reach of the ordinary undergraduate. Students 
of Tacitus, however, will know what I mean when 
I say that a single chapter and sometimes a single 
sentence is a work of art, with appreciable ele- 
ments of beauty, as — marked traits of individual 
style, felicitous combinations of words, poetic dic- 
tion, pleasant variations of syntax, and most of 
all the masterly marshaling of thought, giving 
decisive unity and at the same time a variety of 
emphasis. A familiar example is the opening sen- 
tence of the second chapter of the "Annals." A 
convenient working theory, by the way, is this 
one of variety in unity. Its application may be 
seen in Professor March's Method of Philological 
Study ; and I happen to know, by reading the es- 
says that are presented in the contests for the 
philological prize, that the students make an in- 



TEACHING OF THE CLASSICS 45 

telligent use of it in their criticism of literature. 

This, however, has reference to the forms of 
classic literature, as they are shaped under the 
jesthetic faculty. I should suppose that the main 
point would be the contents, — to lift the student 
toward the level of the author's thinking. I say 
"toward the level," for to raise him to it would 
be a tremendous lift. The authors should be the 
best authors, and the books their best books. 

It goes without saying that the teacher must 
himself rise to that level; yet by that remark we 
are reminded of a standard of capacity and fitness, 
from the test of which perhaps some of us should 
be inclined to shrink. There is no magic in a 
mere professorship, that endows a man in that po- 
sition with omniscient insight to master an au- 
thor's meaning at a glance. The hardest study- 
ing in our colleges is done in the rooms of pro- 
fessors. The late Professor James Hadley, of 
Yale University, I am told, even after years of 
class-room experience that made him illustrious 
as a teacher, never felt fully prepared to meet 
his classes, and never did meet one without hav- 
ing spent two hours of study upon the lesson of 
that period. It gives a great advantage in this 
respect to keep to the same books, and go over 
them again and again ; not to lessen the labor, but 
to make the labor productive of new and greater 
results. There is no great book that doesn't 
deepen to us with repeated study. We find new 
thoughts on every page to say nothing of new 



46 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

and better modes of bringing the thought out, 
and presenting and illustrating and impressing it 
— ^matters of the greatest importance to the 
teacher. We can go to any depth and still find 
that we are in the realm of the classic thought. 
Tacitus, as statesmen and philosophers, as well 
as scholars suppose, is an unfathomed depth of 
wisdom, both practical and speculative. 

Then the masters of classic literature condense 
a good deal. We should hardly think so of some 
of them, Cicero, for example, who generally flows 
along with such full and rounded expression ; but 
even he can condense a whole speech to a sentence, 
and use expressions that are fairly bristling with 
suggestion. 

Mr. Emerson wrote an essay on old age, moved 
to it by reading again the "Cato Major," which 
he praises — not, I fear, without some tone of pat- 
ronage — and thinks he has a few points which 
did not occur to the writer of "De Senectute." 
Naturally our modern life has broadened the pic- 
ture a little, but nearly all, if not absolutely every 
one of his points, can be found on the classic page, 
in the possibilities of meaning covered by its terse 
and significant phrases. One of Emerson's best 
items, for example, is that old age "has found ex- 
pression," to which he devotes two pages. It is 
one word in Cicero, vixit, with an environment of 
context, that makes it pregnant with all this 
Emersonian meaning. Elsewhere Emerson de- 
votes half a dozen pages on travel, to what is sub- 



TEACHING OF THE CLASSICS 47 

stantlally an expansion of the six words in Hor- 
ace, — Patrice quis exsul se quoque fugit. Mat- 
thew Arnold wrote an essay and a whole volume 
of criticism, in both of which the central thought 
was the single word from Aristotle — ffTzoudacbrrjZ ; 
and, in fact, it seems to be a prominent feature 
in the mission of modern literature to draw nutri- 
ment from the ancient and dilute it. A grand 
mission it is too. Just what I would urge upon 
the teacher of classic literature, — to expand and 
bring home to students as they find it suitable, 
or can make it suitable, the truth in the old writ- 
ers. This is the source of their power to human- 
ize, and we should make the most of it. 

Xenophon and Cicero and Horace are as mod- 
ern as Tennyson, or Holmes, or Arnold, far richer 
in the fruits of practical and pertinent, as well as 
profound thinking. They discuss questions which 
still confront us, questions pertaining to political 
philosophy, government, society, business, morals, 
religion and personal life. We can derive from 
them a world of practical prudence for our daily 
doings, and those influences which develop the best 
qualities of mind and heart. In the linguistic 
part of our work the aim should be a scholarly 
mastery of the language, that the student may be 
able to appreciate the shades of thought con- 
veyed in the words, the grammatical forms and the 
idioms. The gist of a passage, however, or the 
thought to which it may lead up by some proc- 
ess of legitimate suggestion may be infinitely 



48 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

more important than any modal shading in its 
grammatical forms, and it would be a pity if we 
were so intent upon impressing our pet theory 
about the imperfect indicative in the apodosis of 
a conditional sentence contrary to the fact, as to 
let the student miss the writer's main thought. 



HIGH SCHOOL TRAINING IN ITS 
BEARING UPON CIVIC INTEGRITY 

The phrase "civic righteousness," quite cur- 
rent of late, is a protest against the ways of 
many of our practical politicians. "Public office 
is a public trust" is another statement of it and 
a little older, going back to the times of Mr. 
Cleveland; "Thou shalt not steal," still older, go- 
ing back to the Ten Commandments. 

When individuals as members of political par- 
ties claiml public place as the reward of political 
service, — that seems simple, and relatively inno- 
cent ; but when the members of the controlling 
group stand together and seek personal gain, get 
office and also get the contracts, take advantage 
of the influence and opportunities of public posi- 
tion to promote in their own behalf graft and ex- 
tortion and all the methods of "shaking the plum 
tree," that is a more serious matter. 

If there is some difficulty in reaching with re- 
forming influences those who are now in active 
politics, we may at least reach those who are to 
be our politicians in the years to come. We 
should inculcate patriotic devotion, and prepare 

49 



50 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

for efficient service, but also and much more we 
should promote the growth of civic integrity. 

What we want, however, is universal integrity 
— that kind of righteousness which will not allow 
a man in passing from one department of his life 
to another, to drop from one level of moral judg- 
ment and action to another. Men quite honor- 
able in private life, upright in dealing, esteemed 
as friends and neighbors, get into public life and 
their conduct often falls to a level that makes a 
stench, yet without violating their own notions of 
right and wrong. Our Capitol plunderers regard 
their prosecution by the state as a cruel persecu- 
tion, and they are dying of broken hearts as 
martyrs ! 

We want our boys and girls to be sound through 
and through. Of course we must be prepared 
to meet with moral immaturity. The ethical 
sense develops slowly. Boys especially pass 
through periods not only of thoughtlessness but 
also of cruelty, and depravity — "pass through," 
thank God ! and come out safe and true on the 
upper levels — ^the result in some sense of a nat- 
ural growth but also of necessary training, home 
training I should say first of all. 

A pertinent question right here is whether the 
lower moral tone in high schools is in part due to 
the growing absence of restraint and moral train- 
ing in the homes. My own impression is that the 
modern surging of our masses in the increasing 
hours of leisure, up and down our streets and out 



HIGH SCHOOL TRAINING 51 

and in to our so-called "parks" in search of 
trivial amusement, is one of the causes of weak- 
ened moral fiber, though there be no positive im- 
morality in the amusements. If so, the entire 
home suffers — father and mother with the boys 
and girls. If so further, the trolley car, the 
moving picture, and the comic supplement are not 
unmixed blessings. They have a mighty clutch 
upon us — they give us so much for five cents. 

We should all hesitate to say, however, that 
there is a general falling back in morals. We 
recognize the fact that moral progress is not a 
uniform upward movement, but a rhythmic move- 
ment up and down, like a tide that flows and then 
ebbs again, and sometimes we lose nearly as much 
— quite as much — as we had gained. Men push 
on with earnestness in certain directions of re- 
form, and while the enthusiastic effort lasts, the 
movement is upward ; but when the advancing 
force has spent itself, the reaction sets in. Then 
the wave drops back, and may reach or even fall 
below its old starting level. That is a common 
experience in political reforms. Yet in long pe- 
riods and when we compare the present with the 
remote past, we do see substantial gains. 

But moral influence in the training of the 
young should be without these rhythmic lapses. 
There must be vigilant effort to hold a steady 
and, if possible, a rising level. Teachers who 
keenly feel that responsibility are under a strain 
that is never released. 



52 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

I have been used to dealing with students in col- 
lege and thinking of educational problems as they 
arise there. Ethical needs make a loud call there 
also, and there must be constant attention to 
their demands. These demands are not met by a 
term or two of lectures in moral science. The 
enforcement of ethical principles must be constant, 
and in connection with conduct. General courses 
may well include instruction in moral science, but 
that is a matter quite different, and pursued with 
a purpose quite remote from the instillation of 
fundamental moral principles. This last may be 
done without scientific instruction in ethics. In- 
deed, I think it may be done best incidentally in 
connection with concrete examples of the various 
virtues, especially if the presentation can be such 
as to rouse thought, and if possible feeling — ^but 
without preachment. 

The opportunities for this come best in litera- 
ture, and this is one of the prime values of lit- 
erary courses. Our college reading offers abun- 
dant openings for it, and high school reading even 
more so, — all Greek and Roman authors, with 
differences of course, and the modern languages 
too, especially the English — Bacon, Bunyan, 
Burke, Ruskin and Tennyson. 

We must use examples. The virtues have to 
be embodied for teaching. The young especially 
must be lifted to a higher level of action and feel- 
ing through their imaginative sympathy with the 
lives of others. Utilitarian wisdom won't do. 



HIGH SCHOOL TRAINING 63 

Anything like calculating prudence is suffocating. 
What we need, especially for the young, is high 
traditions of personal heroism and faith. 

They cannot make ideals of conduct from the 
proverbs of Solomon, wise as these are, soundly as 
they are based on human experience ; or from any 
form of literature in which wisdom is condensed 
into nuggets. There must be embodiment — that 
which appeals in a lively way to the imagination. 
That brings us back to sympathetic contact with 
the persons and the situations of literature. 
These picturesque lessons add to the real life just 
as experience does. Effective moral ideals are 
not generated by physical surroundings such as 
grand buildings, or fine apparatus, or great li- 
braries — except so far as particular books when 
we get into them may be to us the vehicles of per- 
sonal force. Ideals are not generated by pre- 
cepts of wisdom; ideals are generated by con- 
tagions, — by the enthusiasms of personal contact 
with men and women who have spiritual fiber 
enough to project an ideal and to impress it upon 
those with whom they come in contact. 

Your young men who go into your markets and 
exchanges depending upon the commercial world 
for their ideals of honesty will sink to the level 
of the commercial world in that respect and the 
ideal will soon emerge in some such form as 
"Business is business." They will do pretty well 
if they live up to the saying, "Honesty is the best 
policy" ; but that is a low standard. You can 



54 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

easily detect the commercial tone of it — its calcu- 
lating prudence. The man who is honest on that 
principle will expect his honesty to pay. But 
let that boy go into daily fellowship with a teacher 
who is sincere and clean of heart and life, and he 
will soon know that he must be honest whether it 
pay or not; and by the same token he must be 
pure and kind and patient and just — ^whether it 
pay or not. 

Every line of suggestion brings us back to the 
teacher, who must therefore be the best possible, 
and whose distinct personal force must not be lost 
in the elaborate organization of school work. 
That is one of our dangers, for organization has 
its obvious advantages, — of which diminished cost 
is one and perhaps the main one, though there is 
also the charm of the smooth working of an uni- 
fied system. It is magnificent to see in a build- 
ing of, say, two thousand pupils, everything go- 
ing on like clock-work. But it may be just about 
as dead as a clock, just about as far away as a 
clock from any transfer of inspiring influence from 
life to life. I have noted schools where there were 
many teachers of varying capacity doubtless, but 
all brought to about one level by methods of 
organization that made them like cogs in a wheel. 

Routine often minimizes the personal element in 
education. We must get back to the personality 
of the teacher, and take advantage of every ele- 
ment of the situation, and every element of char- 
acter that makes the personality effective. 



HIGH SCHOOL TRAINING 55 

Colleges and universities are feeling this and 
are meeting the need by an attempt to bring stu- 
dents to meet teachers personally, or in smaller 
groups. The smaller colleges are doing this with- 
out difficulty, for their groups are already small; 
but our larger institutions are making a notable 
move in this direction. "Individual Training in 
our Colleges," the title of a book that has been 
widely read, and "The Reorganization of our 
Colleges," a more recent book by the same author 
(Mr. Birdseye) give us a clear indication of the 
demand. 

Specialization of teachers in departments of in- 
struction may also be responsible for some with- 
drawal of emphasis from moral training; not so 
much in high schools however as in colleges and 
universities. Men prepare themselves, by all de- 
grees of minute research, in some special branch, 
and, when they take positions as instructors or 
lecturers, they seem to feel responsible only for a 
certain modicum of instruction without much re- 
gard to personal influence and character. 

At the recent meeting of the International Kin- 
dergarten Union in Buffalo, Mr. Percival Chubb 
made an address in which he had something to say 
on the comic supplement. I saw a notice of the 
address in a recent weekly and should like to 
quote a few lines from it. "I found," he says, 
"no diminution of that distressing vulgarity which 
seems to be growing upon us in our great cities. 
Vulgarity — a flaunting commonness of mind — ap- 



56 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

pears to be a product of the great city. I at- 
tribute the inroads of this vulgarity to the de- 
cline of reverence, the lack of any awed converse 
with great things, an insensitiveness to what is 
fine, distinguished, holy. It is what I have to 
cope with in the young city people, in high school 
and college, in attempting to quicken their deeper 
admiration for great literature; commonness of 
mind, a cheap flippancy, a lack of refined humil- 
ity; of reverence in short. It is vulgarity at its 
worst that thrusts its impertinent tongue at us in 
the comic supplements, in crude violence of color, 
in grotesque distortions of the human counte- 
nance and figure ... in the caricatures of 
elders, aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grand- 
fathers, aye, mothers and fathers, who are trans- 
formed to clowns in order that pert youngsters 
may have their little jokes. . . . More and 
more the function of the school and the teacher 
becomes that of providing a protective environ- 
ment in which for a few hours every day the child 
shall be surrounded with influences of health and 
quiet, of order and simple beauty. The school 
has to save the child from the unhealthy and un- 
lovely world outside. That is a deplorably nega- 
tive function. We cannot rest there. We must 
transform the environment. We must begin with 
ourselves by working for a clean press and, above 
all, for a dignified Sunday press." 

That is a notable point — ^the "deplorably nega- 
tive function" of our work. In morals and in 



HIGH SCHOOL TRAINING 67 

the building up of character in men and women 
it is mainly protective. We are in the midst of 
a widespread abandoment to superficial amuse- 
ment that is enervating, vulgarizing, in many in- 
stances demoralizing, and one of the duties that 
confront teachers is to create and stimulate a 
taste for better forms of amusement. The comic 
supplement, the moving picture and the suburban 
park will do anything to get the nickels. We 
must do our utmost to get the boys and girls. 



VI 

EFFICIENCY THE AIM OF EDUCATION 

The ideals of education are variously conceived 
and expressed, sometimes quite crudely. A New 
York daily paper recently, in response to the per- 
plexity of a college president who found in the 
assets of his institution $200,000 not invested, 
promptly replied that the proper thing to do 
would be to invest the money at five per cent, 
and secure one good professor at ten thousand 
dollars a year! 

A heroic idea, but somewhat of a venture, — 
there are so many items of qualification that 
money can not pay for or secure. You can pay 
for a man's time, for his knowledge, perhaps for 
his talent in certain directions, for his skill in do- 
ing specific things ; but his genius and the ability 
to inspire, — you cannot pay for these, or demand 
them in fulfillment of a contract. They are too 
subtle and personal to be commercialized. Then, 
sympathetic insight into the real purposes of 
education ; devotion, a man's downright and life- 
long devotion to a good work for the making of 
men, — can you buy these? or be sure of getting 

them by laying out a liberal sum in payment.? 

58 



THE AIM OF EDUCATION 69 

Then the element of mere size, — I hesitate to say 
greatness, for while there are great teachers, 
there are not many ; but size at least, that breadth 
of thought and sympathy that gives a man an 
outlook beyond the margins of his own depart- 
ment, — we must have that. 

One of the unfortunate tendencies in our ex- 
panding institutions of learning is that large 
faculties are likely to disintegrate, falling into 
groups or schools, and the groups into individuals, 
so that any one man, competent in his own place, 
meeting his own classes and busy with them, may 
so concentrate upon these subjects and these 
classes as to be narrowed to that specific line, his 
interest and his sympathies circumscribed, until 
he may come to think that his department is the 
whole thing. 

But in every intelligent scheme of education, 
the departments of instruction are not merely 
put side by side, articulated, but enter into each 
other as in an organic union. They have a com- 
mon vitalit3\ Knife the INIathematics and the 
Philosophy will bleed. History, the sciences — all 
studies in fact in which accurate thinking is nec- 
essary. Strike the Latin and it is the English 
that gets a black eye. Men must be large enough 
in comprehension and quick enough in sympathy 
to see and feel this vital unity between the parts 
of a system and to give its real value to each 
branch though quite remote from his own. 

There are certain results that the college as a 



60 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

whole must achieve and that are not reached by 
the mere imparting of a modicum of instruction 
in each department separately, but by coordina- 
tion ; by each working with the others and each 
availing himself of the others' help ; and especially 
in inspiration, by each opening for men the gate- 
way to higher standards in the best things. That 
is the secret of efficiency even in matters the most 
practical. 

In doing the work of the world, we see that men 
must go up, or in the long run they must go out. 
Take the simplest illustration, the men that make 
the fires in locomotives on our railways ; out of 
every hundred, seventeen step forward to the 
throttle of the locomotive; six of this seventeen 
are advanced to locomotives on what are called 
"passenger runs." There is this sifting of men 
on the basis of their capacity to take responsi- 
bility. What then becomes of the eighty-five? 
Well, there is room for them to rise in firing ; and 
so long as they increase in efficiency on their own 
level they are safe ; but if they do not so increase, 
there is other work for them — in the switching 
crew, or the round house, or on the roadbed and 
they must go out. 

That is true of every level of labor. It is a 
law, inexorable ; rather a grim law it would ap- 
pear at first glimpse, but really benevolent and 
cheerful, for it is the basis of the noblest optimism 
that we can entertain, and for this reason; it is 
easier to go up than to go down. Note the rise 



THE AIM OF EDUCATION 61 

of a man in his business or his profession, and you 
will see that every step of ascent brings him to his 
own, to that in which he is at home; the lawyer, 
from the irksome task of writing, to dictation to a 
stenographer ; from his petty cases to his impor- 
tant suits at law that involve great responsibility, 
— in every item of his work or any man's work; 
even in so trivial a matter as his movements from 
his home to his business, — from trudging on the 
sidewalk to riding in the trolley, from that to his 
carriage, and in each for the first time with the 
feeling and look of one in his native air. Next 
year you will see him in his Packard, and it fits 
him ! You might think he had been born in a 
Limousine ! Now put that man back from his 
Packard to his wheelbarrow and how does he 
look? And how does he feel? 

This is the hope of humanity, that men can go 
up and be at home. We can go down too, of 
course, but the whole atmosphere of a lower situa- 
tion is striking and offensive to us, and we can 
only by degrees and with resistance settle down 
to it. 

It is so in social adjustments, so in culture, so 
in art. Raise a man to better social conditions 
than those to which he has been accustomed and 
he will feel an expansive thrill of adaptation that 
will make him instantly at home. Let there be 
an uplift in culture, in literature, music, or any 
art and the soul flutters with the joy of a new 
possession, a new and congenial environment; but 



62 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

you can't go downward in society, in culture or 
in art without a chill. 

It is so in morals, so in the achievements of 
the spirit. There is no compulsion toward the 
downward way. No man can plead his evil in- 
clinations as an excuse for his fall. 

Dr. Osborn used to tell us that "total depravity 
can no more take a man to perdition, than gravi- 
tation can take him to the cellar." He can go 
to the cellar if he wants to, but if he wants to he 
can mount to the chamber of the king. Of 
course men do go down and it often seems like 
an easy drift ; but the way of the trangressor is 
hard. Judas went down, — was it easy.? Nay, it 
was the hardest thing he ever did. Note his hesi- 
tation, his stings of conscience; note that every 
step must be taken against an inner protest, that 
the memory of his innocence brings a fresh smart 
at every turn. The poets from Homer to Tenny- 
son have been telling the world that "sorrow's 
crown of sorrow is remembering better things." 
Judas had stood under the radiance of the Mas- 
ter's presence, on a level with those who could heal 
diseases by a touch or a word. He cannot de- 
scend from that height without the sorrows of a 
revulsion. He would gladly recall the deed if he 
could. He can take the silver back and fling it 
on the table of those with whom he has bartered, 
but, the deed remains, and he passes from regret 
to remorse, from remorse to despair and from 
despair to suicide. He is down and out! 



THE AIM OF EDUCATION 63 

But note the other disciples who were obedient 
to the upward summons, drawing nearer and 
nearer to him who was the source of their life, 
always rising from one level of discipleship to a 
higher level; and was it hard? The easiest thing 
they ever did ! Rising in influence and power and 
each rising to that which was his own place. 

It is the very nature of spirit to be qualified 
by inspiration for these sudden betterments of 
condition. Any upward movement is in response 
to the natural aspiration of the soul; and uni- 
versally we go upward with joy, downward with 
regret and chagrin. 

This point may well be earnestly pressed, for 
it is the secret of efficiency, — the animation of 
young life with a reasonable incitement to im- 
prove. None are more open to such wholesome 
ambitions than the young and it should be a ruling 
factor in the aim of those who teach to set for 
those they teach, high standards in the best 
things. 

It is important also that our progress in gen- 
eral, depends largely upon this spiritual uplift of 
individuals. 

I am not speaking of material progress. A 
high degree of advancement in externals, as in 
wealth, abundance and wonderful inventions, may 
co-exist with moral relapse and decay. But real 
progress is what we must seek, — the increasing 
prevalence of ennobling ideas and aims in com- 
munities as wholes, growth in knowledge not 



64 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

only, but in character and in general welfare. 
We see that the forward movement in these di- 
rections is exceedingly slow. It is impossible to 
lift masses of men bodily to these conditions and 
sometimes there is even a backward pull. Prog- 
ress appears to be rhythmic, rising and falling, 
and not infrequently each fall is deeper than the 
last. It is pendulous, swinging this way and 
that ; and sometimes the forward swing falls short 
of the one that preceded it. The more need then, 
of these personal influences that are the chief 
agencies of progress, not only that individuals 
may rise out of their environment, but may then 
turn and devote their lives to the task of improv- 
ing that environment. Higher education fails in 
its main purpose if the college does not set high 
standards for men and women in the best things, 
and thus qualify them to be themselves centers of 
this progressive influence. 



VII 
SIMPLIFIED SPELLING * 

The fraze "simplified spelling" limits the dis- 
cussion to the changes proposed by the philolog- 
ical societies. These changes hav receivd authori- 
zation by being introduced as a supplement into 
the Century Dictionary, and constitute a mod- 
erate stage of amendment as compared with the 
fonetic ideals of reformers ; yet so difficult is it to 
introduce any variation from the establisht or- 
thografy that it becums a serious question 
whether even so small a change as this is feasibl. 

I shal discus a singl hindrance, viz, the feeling, 
amounting to a prejudice, in favor of the forms 
of words now familiar to the ey. We hav many 
and delicate associations with the rvritn or printed 
word, and any tampering with its form oiFends us. 
There ar literary and scolarly associations : it givs 
a Greek scolar a chil to see phlegm speld flem. 
There ar professional associations : a professor of 
physics would feel robd of half his dignity if it 
wer speld fysics; and there ar personal associa- 
tions of various kinds. 

Foren words, too, cling to their nativ habits, 

* The spelling in this address exhibits some of the 
changes recommended by the Simplified Spelling Board. 

65 



66 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

and it would seem proper that they should do so 
up to a certain point. When they hav becura 
thoroly naturalized they may wel yield to Eng- 
lish analogies. Very litl fault is found with pro- 
gram, brought into conformity with diagram, epi- 
gram, etc. 

It wil be useful to attempt a classification of 
our peple in their relations to this prejudice. 
There ar, first, those who ar set down in the census 
as illiterate, amounting to sumthing like seven mil- 
lions. Then a class not enumerated, perhaps two 
or three times as many as the illiterates — ^viz, 
those who read, but who do so with so much diffi- 
culty, spelling and stumbling along, that the ac- 
complishment is a source of very litl plezure or 
profit to them. Then the foren born, who lern to 
speak English with no great difficulty, but rarely 
master the intricacies of English spelling. This 
clas wil fall litl if any below ten millions. Then, 
fourthly, scool children, a large majority of whom 
ar in daily strugl with the spelling book and the 
reader. Uniting these four classes we hav an ag- 
gregate of more than fifty millions to whom any 
amendment of orthografy that woud make lem- 
ing to read easier woud be an unmixt good. My 
point is that from these classes we should en- 
counter no prejudice. They must sacrifice noth- 
ing, not even feeling. Many of them know just 
enuf about our spelling to visit upon it, under the 
impulse of the clear instincts of truth and reason, 
the hatred it deservs. 



SIMPLIFIED SPELLING 67 

A fifth class, from whom no prejudice would be 
encountered, comprises those who, whether as the 
promoters of scolarship and the science of lan- 
guage or from motives of economy and filan- 
thropy, favor the reform. 

In the remainder of our eighty-five millions we 
find the curious results of the habit of much read- 
ing. 

The art of printing found the English in rather 
a chaotic condition orthograficaly, and in course 
of time the printers gave it uniformity. They fixt 
it arbitrarily often, according to their conven- 
ience or their ignorant notions of what it should 
be. We read it as they printed it, and think it 
Tnust be so — it canH be otherwise. So vivid and 
permanent ar the impressions of eyesight that the 
printed word becums the word to us. We cum to 
luv even its silent letters and its uncouth combi- 
nations, and regard them as necessarily and 
organicaly a part of the word. Cut off the h 
from thumb and the word is left mangld and bleed- 
ing! 

A litl serious candid reflection would convince us 
that the writn word is a ded thing. The living 
word is that which is spoken. Whatever there 
is that makes a word analogous to an organism 
is to be found in the connection which exists be- 
tween the organ of the mind and the organs of 
speech, of such nature that states of mind produce 
movements in the latter. As we ar constituted 
the organs of speech ar vocal, tho we may eke 



68 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

out meaning with what seem to be instinctiv ges- 
tures. The mind seeks to utter itself by vocal 
movements, not by movement of the musls that 
write or the musls that print. There seems to 
be a faculty of speech, the result of our natural 
constitution ; but writing and printing ar inven- 
tions. Language has its natural growth and 
changes according to certain laws ; writing and 
printing ar mechanical operations, every detail of 
which may vary arbitrarily. Our attachment to 
the printed word, therefore, is a matter of associa- 
tion and habit. 

I hav brought this matter to a test in my own 
experience. I onse had a strong preference for 
the establisht spelling; a reluctance to depart 
from it; a tendency to associate the fonetic forms 
of words with illiteracy and ignorance; but that 
feeling has holely past away. It has been my 
practice for many years in my own writing and 
very largely in my correspondence to spel accord- 
ing to fonetic standards. The result is that I 
hav broken up the habit of thinking and feeling 
that t-h-o must be written t-h'-o-iu-g-h. T-h^o is 
the word to me, nor do I hav to eke out its mean- 
ing by a mental picture of the larger form. Even 
in homonyms I hav no difficulty. Whether it is 
svmi m.'oney or a sum of money, it is all the same 
to me (provided it is enuf ) , and I instinctively 
spel it s-u-m in either case. 

I conclude, therefore, that those who think the 
printed form is properly the word are simply un- 



SIMPLIFIED SPELLING 69 

der the influence of a very strange spel. 

When it cums to reasons, we are apt to base 
our preference for the establisht spelling ion the 
claim that it is historical; that it suggests the 
derivation of words, etc. In many cases, it is 
true, the silent letters ar the monuments of vanisht 
sound; but it seems a strange economy to make 
the word itself, that must pass current in daily 
and hourly intercourse, the lumber-room of its 
own worn-out machinery. In a surprizing num- 
ber of cases, however, the spelling of English 
Words is misleading as to derivation. The g in 
sovereign suggests a connection with reign; but it 
is from superanus. The s in island suggests isle 
and the Latin insula, with neither |of which it has 
anything to do. The word is properly Hand, and 
was so speld in erlier English. The s in isle also 
is a comparatively modem interloper ; for tho the 
word is ultimately derived from insula it came into 
English in the form He from the French. The 
w in whole conceals the derivation of the word ; 
the I in could is a blunder ; so the h in ghost, the 
g in foreign, the i in parliament, and in scores and 
hundreds of words letters hav been introduced in 
reckless violation of etymology. 

Many of our spellings also ar simply pedantic. 
Indict came to us from the French in the form 
indite; but when Latin came to be studied again 
and it was discoverd that the ultimate derivation 
was from indictare, c was inserted as a record of 
what? Sumbody's erudition! So victuals Chaucer 



70 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

spels vitaille, directly from the French. Our 
present spelling would suggest that the word 
came from Latin victualia, which is not true. 
And what shal we say of such cases as tongue? a 
simpl Anglo-Saxon word, of two syllabls origi- 
nally, but which lost its ending by fonetic decay 
and was then increast by the appendage ii£ either 
in burlesque or servil imitation of the French 
langue. I am, inclined to think it was a joke, as 
the playful paragrafers now put -ovshy and -vitch 
after familiar English words in burlesque of Tol- 
stoi. But think of petrifying a stupid joke like 
that in the permanent forms of language ! Think 
of compelling a dozen generations of English- 
speaking children to lern it, and as many genera- 
tions of writers and printers to write and print it ! 
Then think of brilliant scolars, at the cloze of this 
nineteenth century, coming before us to defend 
the spelling on the ground that it is "pictur- 
esque !" 

Take now a case where the silent letter is justi- 
fied by etymology. The I in alms is historical, 
but how few there ar to whom it is significant of 
derivation; how few that regard it in any other 
light than a conventional flurish. Take your city, 
with its 250,000 or more peple, not 250 of them, 
not more than 25 of them, write the word and read 
it with any consciousness of the origin of the I. 
Must 250,000, then, be compeld to lern just where 
and how to place this I, which is never sounded, in 
order that 25 Greek scolars may hav the satisfac- 



SIMPLIFIED SPELLING 71 

tion of being reminded of its derivation? Be- 
sides, you coud think of the derivation if you cared 
to just as wel without the silent letter. In fact, 
the i is a mere fragment of the history of the 
word. Why not hav a more complete and ampl 
record.'' Go a litl further back and we find almes; 
a litl further, almesse; then almpsen, almosna, 
almosina, elemosyna, until we reach the Greek 
eleemosune ( ^XerjfjLoauvifj ) . There would be sum 
advantage in this fuller etymological form. We 
should at least avoid in print the puzl of the final 
s, which tends to bring the word into use as a 
plural, whereas it is singular, as we see from Acts 
iii : 3, "askt an alms," and in Enoch Arden — 

"Enoch set himself. 
Scorning an alms, to work whereby to live." 

It is iobvious enuf, however, that words need not 
carry their hole history about with them and dis- 
play it at every recurrence on the printed page. 
The history of words is recorded in literature, and 
it is the business of dictionaries like the Century 
and the great one of Dr. Murray to collect this 
history and exhibit it in convenient form for con- 
sultation. It would be a great gain in furnish- 
ing materials for the history of language if 
sounds should cease to be represented to the ey 
when they cease to be heard. If the I in alms had 
ceast to be writn when it was no longer pro- 
nounced we should be able to mark that point in 



72 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

the history of the word with certainty for which 
we must now depend on other and less satisfactory 
evidence. 

To return for a moment to the classification of 
peple with reference to the ease with which they 
read. It is very far from true that the good 
readers easily lem to spel and lern onse for all. 
With most of us it is a life-long strugl. We ar 
slaves to the dictionary, and when there is none 
at hand we turn our frazes so as to avoid the 
doutful words. We want to write deferd, but ar 
not sure whether there should be one r or two, so 
we say postponed. Like the man who sent a writn 
message to his fysician, saying, "Cum over im- 
mediately; we hav a very painful case of small- 
pox at our house." The doctor hurried over in 
great alarm, examind the patient, and said, 
greatly relievd, "It's not smallpox; it's rheuma- 
tism." "I knew it," answered the man, "but there 
wasn't a soul in the house who coud spel rheuma- 
tism." 

We tamely submit to the hardships of English 
spelling under the mistaken impression that our 
words, if not speld as they ar, would not be Eng- 
lish words. Let us hope that as a result of these 
conferences the lemed societies of Washington, 
and especialy the Anthropological Society, may, 
on the authority of the filologists, make use of 
amended spelling in their publications, and thus 
aid in removing the hindrance offerd by unrea- 
soning prejudice. 



VIII 
WILLIAM CASSIDAY CATTELL, D.D., LL.D. 

There have been two heroic periods in the his- 
tory of Lafayette College. The one to which we 
look back with the most kindly glow of feeling is 
that which culminated in the early sixties, when 
our great war was going on. War, always bad, 
was particularly bad for Lafayette at that time, 
for it was one in a series of discouraging strokes. 
The income of the College was rapidly falling off, 
the President (Dr. McPhail) resigned, the faculty 
dwindled away because of the inability of the au- 
thorities to pay their salaries, the students, what 
few there were, were scattered, many of them to 
the army, and in 1863, the year that General Lee 
invaded Pennsylvania, there were no commence- 
ment exercises at all. 

It became a serious question whether the Col- 
lege could go on. In this crisis a few of the pro- 
fessors — Professor Coffin, Professor March, Dr. 
Coleman, and Dr. Eckard — volunteered to keep 
the doors open and keep the classes going for an- 
other year, satisfied with whatever might be forth- 
coming in the way of salary. That was a very 

73 



74 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

fitting action in a place known for "plain living 
and high thinking," but, as things go in the 
world, so uncommon that I call it heroic. Surely 
here the nobler life of the scholar was not stifled 
by greed. There was no attempt here to set up 
the value of the bread of life where it could be 
measured by commercial standards. 

It was a very fitting action also to be the start- 
ing-point for a career tof growth. These noble 
men had that reward, for it was in that very year 
that the Board called Dr. Cattell from his church 
in Harrisburg to the presidency of the College. 
The clouds broke at once. Everybody was glad. 
Dr. Cattell was already well known here. He had 
been a professor in the College for five years be- 
fore 1860, He was known to be a gifted man, 
with the tastes and ambitions of a scholar, the 
refinement of a gentleman, the tender sympathies 
of a woman, and a strong man's force of char- 
acter. He was bold to undertake, alert and active 
to execute. He felt a strong love for Lafayette, 
and put his shoulder under her burdens with a 
smile of confidence that brought hope to the hearts 
of all her friends. 

The history of the College records the fulfill- 
ment of that hope. From thirty-nine students in 
1863 — there were that many nominally on the 
rolls — the number rose steadily to three hundred 
and thirty-five in 1876. There was a correspond- 
ing increase in the number of professors — from 
eight or nine to twenty-four. New courses of 



WILLIAM CASSIDAY CATTELL 75 

instruction were soon added — all the technical 
courses and the whole scientific department. 

Building after building arose — Jenks Hall, the 
Observatory, the wings of old South, dwelling- 
houses and dormitories, with Pardee Hall as a 
central charm, but last of all the Gymnasium. 
The grounds were enlarged, graded, and beauti- 
fied. The Campus was like a kaleidoscope, to 
which every now and then a turn was given and 
a new combination of beauties flashed upon our 
sight. Dr. Junkin, the first President, lived to 
see the fulfillment of his dream of "lovely Lafay- 
ette." In twelve years the funds of the College 
were increased to something like a million dollars. 
There is not time here to speak of these benefac- 
tions in detail, or even to name the givers, some 
of whom are still living and still the firm friends 
of Lafayette. We never pass this point, how- 
ever, without mentioning one name, Mr. Pardee, 
whose original donation of twenty thousand dol- 
lars gave the first impulse of advance, so far as 
that depended upon money. When that check 
came Dr. Cattell was overwhelmed. He had 
worked for it, prayed for it, but it was too good 
to be true. Mr. Pardee later multiplied that gift 
by twenty, but no money ever came that caused 
greater joy than that check for twenty thousand 
dollars. 

Of course it would be too much to say or imply 
that Dr. Cattell built up all this upon nothing. 
There was a college here and had been for more 



76 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

than thirty years. Its site was unexcelled for 
natural beauty and for the convenience and suit- 
ableness of its surroundings. It had done much 
good work and was beginning to have its honored 
traditions. It had thrown out some strong roots 
into the soil of this "Forks of the Delaware," but 
as yet had drawn through them only a precari- 
ous support. There had been and were then here 
some notable men of science and learning — great 
teachers. Dr. James H. Coffin was here, Dr. 
Traill Green, both of them towers of strength. 
Dr. Lyman Coleman was here; so was Dr. Fran- 
cis A. March, a younger man than any I have yet 
mentioned, but Dr. March came early to be a 
master. Even at that time he had laid the foun- 
dations of that magnificent career in linguistic 
science and educational work which has long been 
and wiU ever be the pride of this College. Pro- 
fessor Youngman was here, a tutor then, vigorous, 
loyal, and rising to his high place as a teacher. 
Dr. Moore was here, just graduating, and get- 
ting ready for the splendid work he has since 
done and is still doing. 

While, therefore, those days of '63 were the 
days of small things at Lafayette, they were be- 
ginnings which had in them infinite promise. Dr. 
Cattell had the penetration to see that, and the 
ability to develop those promises in all the direc- 
tions of their prophetic outlook. In those be- 
ginnings let me not fail to note the speedy call- 
ing of Dr. Porter, in 1866, an alumnus, and now 



WILLIAM CASSIDAY CATTELL 77 

a veteran in the service of the College, who has 
endowed it with the rich fruits of his scientific 
and literary labors ; and of Professor Bloombergh, 
in 1867, who brought to us the wealth of his Ger- 
man scholarship, and has been throughout one of 
Lafayette's main supports as a teacher. 

Such beginnings there were, such men did Dr. 
Cattell have about him and get about him, but 
the great force was in the man at the head. His 
was the impulse, his the directing energy. Noth- 
ing was done at random. Not a dollar was 
added to the endowment, not an acre of ground 
to the Campus, not a man to the teaching force, 
not a branch of study to the curriculum, not a 
building erected, not a path laid out or a shade- 
tree planted, but it had its particular place in 
the larger plan that lay very definitely in Dr. 
Cattell's mind. His purpose was to make this 
beautiful place the home of a great and useful 
institution. 

Scholar as he was, excellent preacher as he was, 
it soon became obvious that his best gifts lay in 
the larger field of administration. In the varied 
work of the College, in its enlarging sphere, he 
himself was the heart and center of it all. 

Every department, whether technical, scientific, 
or literary, had his cordial sympathy and his full 
support ; and his counsel, kindly given, was al- 
ways judicious and enheartening. Students and 
professors alike felt a keen and tender sense of 
the presence of a strong and loving leader. It 



78 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

was a master stroke of the Doctor's, and he made 
a habit of it, to foster favoring influences and 
wisely marshal their application. 

As I look back upon the days when I came to 
college, in 1868, I recall with growing admira- 
tion the hold which that man had upon this com- 
munity, — not the College alone; that he seemed 
to have in his hand and to mold it easily to his 
desires, — but this whole city. There was a time 
when these cities belonged to Dr. Cattell, and 
were in a high sense his for the College, — never 
in his own purpose for himself. Every house 
was open to him, and in many and many a home 
there were men who were his brothers and women 
who were his sisters, who welcomed him as they 
would a dear pastor in times of festivity or 
sorrow, who liked to have him marry their sons 
and daughters, a kind of bishop of the town ; and 
many a story is quietly told of his kindly service 
that would be too personal and too tender for 
public speech. 

A strong and earnest man, devoted as he was 
to a good work, always gets a good grip. But 
add to these qualities a most genial temper, a 
very warm and sympathetic heart, and an ir- 
resistible grace and courtesy of manner, and we 
have a combination that gives a wonderful in- 
crement to a man's usual forces. Dr. Cattell 
used these helps to the full. He got friends for 
the College in that way, — winning them first to 
himself and then securing their interest in the 



WILLIAM CASSIDAY CATTELL 79 

institution. "He had wondrous winning ways," 
says Donald G. Mitchell. 

The success and permanence of Lafayette be- 
came his one ambition and grew mightily in him. 
He was young enough and free enough when he 
came to let it become a controlling factor in his 
career, to adapt himself to it, to enlist his powers 
in it, and let it give a strong tinge to all the 
motives of his personal life. Add to this the^ 
fact that the work was on that higher level where 
the qualities of a man's spirit appear in what 
he does, where he puts the stamp of his personal 
character upon it, and you will not wonder when 
I remind you that for years the College was Dr. 
Cattell and Dr. Cattell was the College. 

Of that group of noble men who stood by him 
as his helpers a few only are still with us, and these 
still at our President's right hand, — Mr. Hollen- 
back, Dr. Knox, Dr. Curwen, Mr. Long. Others 
are now fittingly represented there by their sons, — 
Dr. Waller, Dr. Hand, Mr. Pardee, Mr. Adam- 
son, Mr. Fox, Dr. Green, — as if so noble a service 
should not be interfered with by the limitations 
of human life. Any of these older men could tell 
you far better than I can how Dr. Cattell carried 
this College upon his heart to the people, not only 
extending and multiplying the sources of her 
help, but also enlarging the sphere of her influ- 
ence. 

We knew him better here in his relations to 
the inner life of the College. His thought 



80 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

seemed to take in easily every detail of the great 
work; his hand was everywhere, but with a soft 
and winning touch; in discipline, if more firm, 
it was never hard — always tender. There was 
nothing like ofiicial arrogance. He came down 
from the presidential chair and sat by the boy. 
I have been present at these interviews and heard 
him talk to one and another under censure. It 
was like the talk of a father or brother who loved 
them, not upbraiding them, or seeking to bring 
home to them a sense of the badness of their con- 
duct, — they usually had that already, — ^but 
speaking of the grace of God, and reminding 
them that all of us, whether president or pro- 
fessor or pupil, were in perishing need of that 
grace to keep us right. 

To discipline or have occasion to discipline 
one of the students was harder upon the good 
Doctor than upon the boy; harder upon the good 
Doctor, if possible, than upon the boy's mother. 

And what genial soul he was ! Socially a 
center too; ready and responsive, the delight of 
every company he entered. In those great days 
there was an unfailing flow of good fellowship 
and good spirit from him. He could mingle the 
playful with the serious with inimitable grace 
and with a tact that had in it a touch of 
magic. 

In the matter of discipline his constant effort 
was to prevent the occasions for it. He was al- 
ways seeking to create and foster a wholesome 



WILLIAM CASSIDAY CATTELL 81 

College sentiment that would frown upon and 
prevent improper conduct. In this work he en- 
listed students and teachers alike. Events that 
might become occasions for discipline — a class 
supper, an annual sleigh-ride, or a campaign of 
hazing — were anticipated and controlled by bring- 
ing to bear upon all, and especially upon the 
master spirits, an influence that kept them within 
bounds. 

In these matters the use of his persuasive skill, 
turning upon traits I have already noted, almost 
amounted to a foible; I mean in his habitual re- 
sort to it, and his taking a kind of pride in it. 
He could wrap a committee of students about his 
finger like a plaything; with winning grace and 
sparkling pleasantry he would press his point 
even when seeming to make concessions, and could 
instantly turn objections into the persuasive 
points of his own argument. The result always 
was that the committee stood with the Doctor, 
but sometimes it was more because they were 
persuaded than because they were thoroughly 
convinced. 

Dr. Cattell was, as I have said, scholarly in his 
tastes and ambitions. He often delivered most 
acceptable lectures on learned subjects. He was 
a lover of the best things in literature and art, 
but especially fond of the ancient classics. He 
had made a special study of the original scrip- 
tures of the New Testament, both in doctrinal 
and linguistic directions ; and as for Latin, with- 



82 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

out the least indication of pedantry, he would 
often quote a most apt and telling passage from 
Cicero or Vergil. He frequently spoke to me of 
his desire to make an edition of Lactantius, and 
in fact began it, but the calls upon his time were 
too many to permit him to finish it. 

The Doctor was a good preacher. This had 
originally been and in some sense always re- 
mained his life work. He had profound convic- 
tions as a man of God. He would base all the 
instruction of the College upon Christian culture, 
with the Bible as the foundation. Always in his 
heart and always ready to leap to his lips was an 
abiding anxiety for the spiritual welfare of the 
College. Its religious services were his, and he 
was never absent from them when he was in town ; 
and never during that time, so far as I can recall, 
did I hear such an expression as "compulsory at- 
tendance" of religious services, — as though there 
were any compulsion about it ! Prayers were a 
part of the life of the institution, and always 
should be, and there was nothing in the atmos- 
phere of the place to suggest that it was an un- 
essential part of that life, and might therefore 
just as well be abolished. 

Dr. Cattell, as I said, was a fine preacher. He 
did not compass (as what man does or can com- 
pass?) all the avenues by which spiritual truth 
finds its way to the human heart ; but he gave 
good sermons, ringing with sound doctrine and 
rounded with polished phrase. On certain levels 



WILLIAM CASSIDAY CATTELL 83 

of earnest personal appeal he was well-nigh ir- 
resistible. 

Such, in very brief and inadequate outline, was 
the man who was our President for twenty years 
— from 1863 to 1883. It was a period of 
abounding life and enthusiasm. The College 
cheer was invented in that period — about 1876 — 
and the Campus began to resound with its ring- 
ing La-fay-ette. The Doctor himself fixed upon 
the maroon and white as the colors. Athletics 
began to be cultivated; College groups began to 
pose before the camera, and no group was com- 
plete without his genial face. Enthusiasm was 
aroused by creating and fostering here that which 
could become the center and the object of warm 
and loyal feeling. 

We learned to think of the College in that 
way, — as a permanent institution not only, but 
also as a living thing which appealed to and re- 
sponded to affection. The founders had some- 
how breathed into it a life of its own. The Col- 
lege is a being analogous to an organism, but of 
a high kind: it feels, it rejoices, it hopes, it en- 
dures, by reason of the onflowing currents of its 
own life. What calamities it can suffer and still 
survive ! I could tell you some of them ; you 
yourselves know some of them. Twice Pardee 
Hall has been in ashes, a matter of no great con- 
sequence in either case. We thought otherwise 
at the time. We stood dumb when it was burn- 
ing, and wondered what was going to become of 



84 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

Lafayette. But how easily we go on, only a 
little compression, a little inconvenience for a few 
weeks or a few months. Such a calamity does 
harm, of course, but not vital harm. You must 
go deeper than the buildings, deeper than the 
grounds, deeper even than the men who happen 
to be here, to make a fatal stroke at the life of 
the College. It can stand abuse; it can endure 
to be misrepresented to its public, to have the 
facts of its inner life distorted and falsified. It 
can have unruly students and still live. It can 
stand lukewarm or even disloyal alumni. It can 
stand incompetent professors, half a dozen of 
them, and still live ; because in the opera- 
tions of its healthy life such errors will be cor- 
rected. 

A defeat, for example in an athletic contest, 
does not do us a hundredth part of the harm we 
imagine it does ; nor does a victory do us a hun- 
dredth part of the good we imagine it does, — 
that is, imagining on the basis of our feeling at 
the moment of defeat or victory. The one factor 
which we leave out of the account in these hurried 
judgments of ours is the deep and constant flow 
of the College's life, so that occurrences on the 
surface affect it but slightly. It has had its 
birth; it has been fostered into vigorous growth 
and strength. 

I speak of these things because they have a 
special pertinence on an occasion like this. 
Every man who has lived here and done a good 



WILLIAM CASSIDAY CATTELL 85 

work has made some contribution to the spirit of 
the institution, to its life. 

What a debt of gratitude we owe to the men 
of the early time who planted and fostered this 
growth ! And what a contribution to the life of 
Lafayette was made by Dr. Cattell, who poured 
into the fund of her vitality his thought, his 
spirit, and his devotion during those twenty years, 
and never ceased to cherish her to his last hour ! 

We owe to him a monument. Each of us 
should rear in his heart a memorial to Dr. Cattell, 
and inscribe upon it, in grateful recognition of 
his worth, "A man of God, thoroughly furnished 
unto all good works." 



IX 

PROFESSOR FRANCIS A. MARCH, LL. D., 
L.H.D. 

It has not been easy to think of this occasion 
as a formal and stately memorial service, but 
rather as a more familiar and intimate conference 
suited to the gathering of this larger family of 
the College. To all but the most recent addi- 
tions to the Faculty, and to all students but the 
very latest class. Professor March was a familiar 
figure, present at all our games, or strolling 
about our campus or through our streets ; and 
even to those who did not know him as a teacher, 
he was pointed out reverently and well known as 
"Lafayette's Grand Old Man." 

A grand man indeed! One who has left to us 
the heritage of a great life, and not to us alone 
here at the College, but to this community and 
to the world-at-large. He was great in many 
directions, and many fields are claiming the fruit- 
age of his labors. What a lawyer he would have 
been! What a legislator! What a Judge in 
some great court ! Indeed his first resort to 
teaching was a makeshift, as often with young 
men of limited means, two years at Leicester and 

86 



FRANCIS A. MARCH 87 

two at Amherst. But he had decided upon the 
Law as his profession and began the study of it 
during this last engagement. His further study 
and early practice of law was, however, inter- 
rupted by weakened health and he was obliged to 
seek a warmer climate, settling at last for a few 
years at Fredericksburg, Va. 

I note these few biographical details only to 
indicate how it was that he came to Lafayette. 
Dr. McPhail was the principal of the Academy in 
which he was teaching in Fredericksburg, and Dr. 
McPhail was soon called to the pastorate of the 
Brainerd church, Easton, and a little later was 
made President of the College. He knew this 
Francis A. March as a teacher and called him to 
Lafayette as a tutor in 1855, and two years 
later that tutor was made Professor of the Eng- 
lish Language and Comparative Philology. 

It was the fashion then in the progressive in- 
stitutions to recognize Comparative Philology as 
worthy of a place among the departments, or to 
share in a place. Usually it was Sanskrit and 
Comparative Philology, as at Yale and Harvard. 
It was the study of Sanskrit about 100 years 
ago that opened up the comparative study of 
languages. Few people knew much about the 
Sanskrit, but it seemed a fitting thing to place 
this venerable speech and literature of India, with 
Comparative Philology, in some dignified emi- 
nence upon a pedestal in great institutions of 
learning. It was therefore a bold innovation 



88 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

on the part of the authorities at Lafayette to 
bring this science of Language down to the level 
of this modem vernacular of ours. But the in- 
novation was soon justified, for within a few years 
it was evident that Professor March, instead of 
lowering Comparative Philology, had raised the 
English and the Anglo-Saxon with their splendid 
classic literatures to the high level of the sister- 
hood of the Indo-European tongues. 

He had heard lectures of Noah Webster and 
had been under the instruction of Professor W. C. 
Fowler, author of what has always seemed to me 
the best English Grammar we have ; and he had 
ideas of his own about the teaching of English — 
a philological method. There was then talk, and 
there has since been a good deal more of it — that 
we should read Latin and Greek as we read Eng- 
lish. Professor March's idea was that we should 
read English as we do Latin and Greek! That 
is, with minute and critical inquiry into words, 
not only their history and forms and uses, but 
the laws of speech and the laws of thought, and 
all that is pertinent in geography and mythology 
and history — the history of the times and the 
history of the race. 

For his students and for the teachers that were 
soon turned out by scores and hundreds, who were 
competent to conduct the teaching of English in 
a similar way, text-book were needed and within 
a few years came the "Method of Philological 
Study of the English Language," the "Parser 



FRANCIS A. MARCH 89 

and Analyser," and soon, the "Anglo-Saxon 
Reader," and then the "Comparative Grammar 
of the Anglo-Saxon Language," a book that made 
an epoch in the progress of linguistic Science. 

The elements of the curriculum soon began to 
bend toward and find their unity in this course. 
All the language studies in particular reached 
their solid coherence in being so adjusted as to 
contribute, each in its own way, to the applica- 
tion of Comparative Philology. Professor March 
rose to be a peer of the Masters in this, the men 
under whose inspiration he caught his first im- 
pulse, Professor Max Miiller, Jacob Grimm, Fran- 
cis Bopp and George Curtius. 

To accomplish such a work in a special field 
might well be the height of a scholar's ambition, 
but we must not stop here. There are endow- 
ments that give the great and wise man freedom 
in all fields. We find our scholar not only fore- 
most in English and Comparative Philology but 
taking high rank as a clear and profound thinker 
and worker in other directions : in Philosophy, 
in Pedagogy, in Natural Science, in Lexicog- 
raphy, in Law. From time to time as needed he 
had classes in Greek and Latin and in the modern 
languages ; for years in political economy, and in 
Psychology to the end of his active life. 

Indeed his influence was felt throughout the 
teaching and governing forces of the College, 
molding its curriculum, its discipline, its policy, 
its educational methods. 



90 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

The presidents leaned upon him. Dr. Mc- 
Phail, Dr. Cattell for twenty years, Dr. Knox, 
and Dr. Warfield, and no president ever had a 
more loyal colleague. On any important subject 
of faculty action, he would clearly state his views, 
and if the president hesitated to agree with him, 
and still hesitated to take a course in opposition 
— I recall one memorable instance of the kind in 
the best days of Dr. Cattell — Professor March 
quietly remarked to the great relief of the presi- 
dent, that he thought it his duty to state his 
views frankly in conference, but if the president 
wished to adopt a different policy, it was for 
him to recognize that there might well be more 
wise ways than one of meeting a crisis ; and when 
the president chose a course, it was for him to 
fall in and do his utmost in helping to carry it 
out. 

Then in the sixties came that great expansion 
in the study of the sciences, the applied sciences, 
our Technical courses. They came in response 
to the needs of our industrial environment — ^this 
busiest end of the old Keystone State. Note 
right here at the Forks of the Delaware, the net- 
work of railway tracks, and the bridges that span 
our streams, the mineral resources near by that 
must find an exit here, and the many enterprises 
of manufacture whose success depends upon the 
results of the nicest chemical analysis. 

Of course there were other competent men here 
to aid in this new departure — Dr. Cattell himself 



FRANCIS A. MARCH 91 

at the head of it, alert and keen-eyed, inspected 
technological institutions on both sides of the 
Atlantic; Professor James H. Coffin, a master in 
his department of physics and astronomy, and a 
brilliant pioneer in meteorology ; Dr. Traill Green, 
with a wide reputation as a physician and a chem- 
ist ; Dr. Thomas C. Porter, an authority in botany, 
and well versed in other natural sciences ; but 
every one of these would say what I now say, that 
in the organization of these courses and in that 
whole period of expansion as throughout, our 
genius in education has been Dr. Francis A. 
March. 

But in dwelling upon these broader aspects of 
educational work, all Lafayette men will feel that 
I am missing the main point — Professor March 
as a teacher in the class-room. 

We thought him great in every field of learn- 
ing. We might have been mistaken in that, but 
in the weight and power of his personality we 
made no mistake. We made no mistake in think- 
ing him a wise man. That may include high at- 
tainments in learning, but beyond that we think 
of his profound discernment, of his judgment, 
sensitive to the guidance of conscience, coupled 
with a noble rectitude — absolute intellectual and 
moral integrity; then his fortitude — Cicero's 
fortis atque constans — not however the stoical 
attitude of mere resolute submission to fate, but 
the nobler fortitude of a Christian faith in mat- 
ters pertaining to God, and of a clear and great 



92 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

understanding in dealing with the problems 
which our life imposes as the tasks of our intelli- 
gence. 

He impressed us as so simply yet so grandly 
sincere. What he stated to us seemed the solid 
truth, clear in its statement and convincing, not 
by any show of wisdom, but by its very breadth 
and finality. In the class-room the subject was 
something, the text-book something, but the man 
was everything. He dealt with great subjects — 
in their elementary aspects of course, but even 
there the clear depth was always revealed, and 
earnest students soon caught the habit of wait- 
ing for his least word of explanation with bated 
breath. 

To students of his, his personal influence on 
young men will appear to be his greatest achieve- 
ment. To win young men is a most fruitful form 
of success — to help them discover their capacities, 
and learn how to use them, to inspire them with 
principles, and so come to their moral rescue at 
a critical time, to help them often to specific pro- 
fessional equipment — lawyers, ministers, journal- 
ists, business men, teachers — hundreds of them 
have gone out from Lafayette College, who have 
caught their most vital inspiration from him, 
and so far as possible his method and the quality 
of his spirit. 

He taught men to think. He kindled in them 
the love of truth, and then when their interest 
was aroused, would furnish their minds by the 



FRANCIS A. MARCH 93 

ministration to them of the judgments of his own 
maturer wisdom. And how modestly he would 
do it ! One might think it much more important 
from his attitude, that the class should hear what 
some student thought about the subject, than 
what he thought. Always himself a learner, and 
a humble one, no matter what was the source of 
the knowledge. "Never a pair of eyes made that 
were not well worth looking through," he said. 

Then a man of high standards of conduct and 
duty; one who with ease and confidence though 
with humility could walk out into the light of the 
divine requirement and measure the items of our 
human life with true measurements ; not an easy 
thing to do, so many little standards that we ap- 
ply to ourselves, comparing ourselves with our- 
selves or with others, that when we see one in 
greatness and simplicity of soul come out strong 
and square himself up to truth and God's stand- 
ard — that's a man who lays hold of us with the 
power of those who walk in high places ; and if, 
as it is said, 99 out of every 100 moral questions 
of life are to be decided in college, it is a grand 
thing for a student to have in any way the lifting 
fellowship of such a nature. No man who knows 
Professor March and has sympathetic apprecia- 
tion of him, can think of him and then turn and 
decide weakly or meanly any question of life's 
morals. 

Professor March was a diligent worker, took 
upon himself arduous tasks, but worked easily. 



94. HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

"with free mind" as he would say, and even in 
his hours of leisure was far from idle, being much 
given to easy and cheerful brooding. 

I say cheerful that you may not think of it as 
moodiness. "Simmering of thought" he called it. 
He would walk up and down, or latterly, sit at 
some of these points of vantage where there is a 
fine view, of which there are many here about us 
— and thus leisurely taking the scene in, and thus 
filling the currents of his life with the best that 
nature could give would think — not aimless and 
random thoughts — ^but of some definite subject, 
with some definite aim. It was his theory of 
productive, and I may say of creative thought, 
that, with open mind and its processes gently di- 
rected in definite channels, letting the unforced 
activities of the mind flow easily on, that is the 
condition in which a man does his best intellectual 
work. 

He pondered much thus upon the unsolved 
problems of language, its origin, growth, and 
changes. On one occasion he spoke to me of a 
group of facts in our own language, hitherto un- 
explained, and said that he had thought more 
about it than about any other subject except, 
perhaps, some of the great moral questions. He 
solved it too, and the solution stands unchallenged 
in his Anglo-Saxon Grammar. 

I speak of it here only as a hint of his mental 
methods. It is well worth knowing how such a 
man gets hold of truth and forms conclusions. 



FRANCIS A. MARCH 96 

He reached truth by keen and accurate ob- 
servation and by patient thought. Facts would 
lie clear and true on his eye, in their even value 
and relations, without any hindrance of distrac- 
tion, or any intervening medium of prejudice; and 
his sense went straight to the critical point of 
inquiry. 

Then he who notes truly the relations of facts 
will be able to organize the separate items of 
knowledge and arrive at laws and principle. 
This is a rarer, a larger, and a nobler work inas- 
much as in promoting the welfare of men, ideas 
and principles have a value far exceeding the 
value of facts. In Dr. March's case we come 
to this highest level of scholarly activity. He 
was a "worker for progress," "devoted to the con- 
quest of nature, the discovery of truth, and the 
welfare of the race." He looked out intelligently 
upon the busy world and knew the needs of men ; 
and while he felt to the full the charms of erudi- 
tion, his aim and his delight in scholarly pursuits 
was to do work whose results contained the prom- 
ise of utility. That is the golden motive of the 
"scholar of to-day," 

It was at his initiative that scholars and edu- 
cators of England and America took up the en- 
terprise of simplifying our English orthography. 
That was in the early seventies when he was, for 
the first time, President of the American Philo- 
logical Association. Eminent professors and edu- 
cators rallied around him, an association was 



96 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

formed of which he was President, and an Inter- 
national Association in 1876, and in the course 
of a few years the scholars here and in England 
had done their work under the leadership of Pro- 
fessor March; that is, they had clearly pointed 
out the need, the method, and the processes of 
the reform, and had provided a suitable alphabet 
and a long list of words, about four thousand, 
in which the simplification might well begin. 
What remained to do was to overcome ignorant 
prejudice, mountains of it! It was not the work 
of a day, or a year, and the progress already 
made and still being made, quiet but substantial 
and even rapid, justifies the sublime faith of the 
leader that these mountains could be removed. 

Those who have been his students find them- 
selves, as the years pass, under a deepening sense 
of their obligation to Professor March. They 
speak of it in quiet tones of reverence — not very 
definitely often — ^not so much his teaching of Eng- 
lish, or Psychology, as something in him. It is 
not easy to speak definitely of the influence of 
personality. 

We must here take into account that transfer 
of power from life to life, those intellectual and 
spiritual contagions by which the strong impart 
themselves to others. 

The ideal situation for this transfer is that of 
discipleship. There is no dream of the mystic 
that is not realized in the working of mind upon 
mind and spirit upon spirit in this relation. Our 



FRANCIS A. MARCH 97 

finest experiences come to us in this way — the 
joys of discovery in the intellectual world, the 
sense of added power in the realm of personal 
force. There's healing in it, there's new birth 
in it. When it comes at the word or the look of 
the greatest of teachers, when the hem of his gar- 
ment is touched and the flow of blood is staunched, 
we call it miracle, and so it is ; but it is a miracle 
which in its lesser manifestation recurs in our 
daily experience. There is a teacher's touch at 
which the scales fall from the eyes, and the blind 
receive their sight ; and many an Elisha takes the 
mantle of the master, and with it parts the hin- 
dering elements, making a way for himself, in 
which he walks in the strength and in the spirit 
of the greater man who taught him. Such was 
the influence of Socrates — not so much that he 
taught men though he did teach them, as that he 
inspired them ; and of Scaevola — not so much for 
the soundness of his legal responses, as for the 
character of the man inspiring a confidence that 
nothing could shake. 

We name in this connection our great modern 
teachers, Dr. Arnold, Dr. Nott, Dr. Hopkins and 
others and we add to it the name of Dr. March, 
rich in the treasures of mind, strong in convic- 
tion, with a sincerity and a force of character 
that gave weight to his every word, and that 
made his very presence a benediction. He gath- 
ered class after class about him, became venerable 
in the work, and lived and still lives under a 



98 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

widening halo of tender memories. I think of 
him often as a noble freeman in the commonwealth 
of intelligence, associating there with the great 
of all ages, uplifted by their fellowship, thinking 
their thoughts, warmed by their sentiments and 
cheered by their hopes. 

He has often spoken to me of Scipio's vision, 
that rarest gem of ancient literature, and I have 
sometimes wondered, without quite daring to ask 
him, what special feature of it pleased him most; 
whether that little drama of the human life con- 
tinued in the starry world, where the younger 
Scipio talks with Africanus and presently asks, 
"Is my father Paulus here ?" "Why, yes ; do you 
not see him coming to you now?" And the boy 
turns and rushes into the embrace of his father, 
pouring out as he says "a flood of tears"; or 
whether the Platonic argument for immortality. 
Hardly that, however, for Professor March 
would not need Plato's argument though he might 
admire it; or perhaps the vast expanses of the 
starry universe. At one point they are trans- 
ported as in the speed of thought to the radiant 
circle of the milky way, and from there look 
back; but the earth and all the planets and their 
sun have dwindled to a mere point scarcely visible. 
I think I have noted that his eyes would brighten 
at that ; or whether the divine mission of our hu- 
man life, for the lad would stay with his father 
even as Peter would have stayed on the Mount of 
Transfiguration. "Not so," says Paulus, "lest 



FRANCIS A. MARCH 99- 

you seem to shirk the human service to which 
God has assigned you" ; and then talked to him 
of his high duties to men. 

I am sure that no ideals were more firmly held 
or more tenderly cherished by Professor March 
than his ideal of loyal service to humanity. We 
have heard him read the strong words of appeal 
on this very subject in Phi Beta Kappa, and have 
seen how deeply they affected him. The lip would 
soon quiver, the eyes moisten, the voice falter and 
the hands so tremble that he could hardly hold 
the book. He could think big thoughts and thrill 
with fine sentiments. He lived very near if not 
well within the margins of that realm whose 
mighty realities hover over us, whether we know 
it or not, and whose forces are the forces of 
spirit and of truth. 



PROFESSOR MARCH 

Your president has asked me to say a few words 
about Professor March. The time is too short 
for more than one or two glimpses, and these had 
better be in the way of reminiscence. 

Of course we feel not a little pride in the great- 
ness and fame of our "grand old man" ; and I 
would emphasize that last — his fame, because a 
few months ago at the time of his death, some 
of the papers, especially here in your own city 
spoke with some discouragement about it. One 
of the best editorials I saw, in the main substance 
of it, was headed "An unappreciated scholar." 

It never would have occurred to me to think of 

Professor March as unappreciated. He had 

most sincere and discriminating recognition, — at 

home in his own city even popular recognition. 

When we set aside a Founder's Day to honor him, 

as we did a few years ago, the city of Easton 

joined us most enthusiastically. The schools 

were closed so that teachers and children could 

come to the hill; the Mayor and the city councils 

came in a body; the stores were closed at certain 

hours and business men and citizens thronged to 
100 



PROFESSOR MARCH 101 

the college ; the Board of Trade came in a body 
and so of other civic organizations and the fire- 
men made it a day of parade. So popularly ; but 
in educational and scholarly circles he was held 
in highest appreciation. For years he was easily 
our foremost linguistic scholar and was twice 
president of the American Philological Associa- 
tion. The English universities gave him most 
distinguished honors and savants on the conti- 
nent, especially in Germany were singing his 
praises in a long chorus. 

But his fame is not our first or dearest thought 
even now; and certainly was not when we came 
to college twenty, thirty, or forty years ago. 

He was famous even then. He had published 
two or three articles on philosophy in the early 
sixties and they were within a few weeks reprinted 
in Edinburgh and made the Scotch and English 
philosophers sit up and rub their eyes, and even 
in France their great philosopher Cousin 
promptly sent to Professor March a request that 
he be the editor of the American edition of his 
works. 

Yet it was not his fame as I said, that we 
thought of first, but that we should go to his 
class-room Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and 
Saturday, at 8 o'clock and perhaps at other pe- 
riods of the week. Those were glorious hours, 
long to be remembered ! His masterly develop- 
ment of subject matter from the text-book, — it 
didn't much matter what the text-book was — any 



102 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

old edition of Demosthenes, De Corona, any old 
text-book on the constitution, or mental philoso- 
phy — Haven of all things in the world! The 
modern psychologist comes along and pushes it 
out as stuff; and rightly too, for the method of 
studying psychology is very different from that 
of forty years ago. But we had the man and the 
book did not matter. He opened for us the gates 
of thought, not merely that we might look within 
but that we might walk within. He taught us 
to think. There was a directness and simplicity 
in his method. We must stick to the main point 
— never dodge the main issue and if we halted or 
had difficulty he would encourage us and guide 
our faltering steps. Those were strenuous hours, 
hours of conquest and all the pleasures of it, the 
joys of discovery in the world of the intellect and 
the sense of added power in the realm of personal 
force. The hours were too short for us. Do 
you remember how we lingered in the room when 
the period ended, not to interview the Professor, 
but from sheer reluctance to leave the place.? 

And how patient he was ! and kindly and help- 
ful. Earnest students found in him most ready 
sympathy and aid in all their difficulties ; indiffer- 
ent and indolent ones also got what they needed 
and deserved, rebuke. So tempered with kindness 
often that the boy didn't feel the sting of it until 
he had had time to think it over; then he might 
feel a pricking under the fifth rib, not fatal 
though it felt so, but in the end salutary. 



PROFESSOR MARCH 103 

I remember an instance when we were having 
a class conversation on culture and the studies 
that promote it. One fellow blurted out rather 
recklessly, "All studies are culture studies." The 
Professor's eyes twinkled a moment, then his face 
quickly sobered and nodding his head slowly, he 
said, "So, so ; then you are using the word culture 
in a sense that is unknown to me." That might 
be a confession of ignorance and the fellow might 
at first throw out his chest in conceit thinking, 
"Now I have arrived, for I have found a meaning 
of culture that Professor March did not know." 
But surely a little reflection would bring out that 
saving sting and if he went to his dictionary for 
definitions of culture, if he turned to his books 
to read about it, and to his fellow students and 
the professors to talk about it, — if by any means 
he came to the first gleams of that truth that cul- 
ture is not knowledge or training, but is the re- 
finement of intelligence and of taste and of life 
and that if one get it, he gets it by mastering the 
thoughts of men whose thoughts have moved and 
are moving the world, by the ability to appreciate 
the creations of men whose work represents the 
best in art, and by winning to his intellectual and 
moral make-up the best in human life, — 
if I say, he came to the first gleam of 
these realizations, he achieved that which in 
itself represents a value far above the cost of his 
whole college course. Such was very often the 
value of his keen, though kindly rebukes. 



104 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

I remember one occasion when he administered 
such a correction to a whole class. Thursday 
mornings at eight, the whole college went to him 
for "Elocution." There would be declamations 
by a few members each of the three lower classes 
and short original orations by a few seniors. 
When the first of the Juniors had spoken there 
was generous applause to which the freshmen, 
present for the first time, added a noisy stamp- 
ing of feet. When it ceased Professor March 
said, "I would request the new students not to 
applaud with the feet. We don't do that here." 
Giving little heed to this request, the class, at the 
conclusion of the next declamation, repeated the 
offensive clatter of feet and the Professor quietly 
remarked, "I asked you not to applaud with your 
feet. If you are not sufficiently interested in a 
speech to keep still when it's ended, clap your 
hands !" 

I said a moment ago that he taught us to 
think; but there must be food for thought and 
first of all he taught us to read. We could run 
over the lines and pages glibly enough, but we 
got so little from them. Working with Professor 
March we soon saw that when an author has writ- 
ten out his thought, any word in that text may 
be a gold mine. 

Well do I remember our first recitation with 
him, in Trench "on the study of words." The 
first lesson had been announced: "the Preface." 
"The Preface indeed!" we thought, — we sopho- 



PROFESSOR MARCH 105 

mores who had acquired all the learning in sight 
and were ci'ying out for more worlds to conquer, 
were we to be started out with a "preface"? 

We thought that an author might dawdle in 
his preface — play with his subject; so also with 
the introductory lecture. What we wanted was 
to plunge at once into the very thick of his sub- 
ject-matter. So with some indifference we opened 
that preface — those three or four pages of 
coarser print than the rest of the volume. 

How easy and simple it was ! We knew it at 
a glance and soon finished our preparation ; but 
the next morning at recitation we found that we 
knew nothing about it. What did we know of 
the "Diversions of Purleigh"? What did we 
know of the mistakes of Horn Tooke or of the fine 
figure of Coleridge — that speech is like amber, not 
only in its efficacy to circulate the electric spirit 
of truth, but also in embalming and preserving 
the relics of ancient wisdom. But we didn't get 
as far as that, floundering rather in the first page 
or two of that simple preface, — learning to read. 
We were to learn it from his methods of handling 
a subject and from what he required of us. His 
first question was, "What is the first thought in 
the preface"? So we were to read by thoughts. 

The opening sentences seemed easy — about the 
original audience, and the changes required to 
adapt the lectures to a larger circle ; little trou- 
ble here except with the puzzle of "those rather 
than these"; but when we came to the statement 



106 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

that "for many a young man his first discovery 
that words are living powers, has been like the 
dropping of scales from his eyes, like the acquir- 
ing of another sense, or the introduction into a 
new world," there we met our Waterloo. "What 
does Trench mean by 'words are living powers,' 
Mr. McKnight?" McKnight arose, blushed, 
rested his hands on the bench before him, wrin- 
kled his brow, and made a guess wide of the mark 
evidently, for without comment the Professor 
called Mr. Wiely. "Words are living powers, 
Mr. Wiely?" Wiely, impulsive, just then rather 
incoherent, stammered something that did not de- 
lay us long, for immediately Mr. Harris was 
called and Wiely sat down. "Living powers, Mr. 
Harris?" "A figure of speech," said Harris. 
"Ah." And we thought Harris had scored. 
"Please explain the figure." His explanation 
did not make it clear, and with a merry twinkle 
of the eye the Professor said, "You had better 
consider it plain speech, not figurative; living 
powers, Mr. Hudson?" And Harris took his 
seat. So with Hudson and Bradley, and Owen 
and Douglass. We were called by lot and awaited 
our turns with some trepidation now, wondering 
too why it had not occurred to us to think of all 
this and prepare for it. Then Lewis was called. 
"Powers, Mr. Lewis; are words powers at all?" 
"And what does that mean?" Here was a ray 
of light and a simpler beginning; a new advance 
also in the process of teaching us to read. First, 



PROFESSOR MARCH 10*7 

read by thoughts ; secondly, when you come to a 
complex thought, analyze it. Lewis was of opin- 
ion that words are powers, and by hints and helps 
here and there, he and others brought out pretty 
clearly that words convey from mind to mind 
ideas, arguments, reasons, influences, and so are 
powers. "To return to 'living' powers, Mr. 
Watkins, what does he mean by 'living'.'"' 
"Clear, vivid." "Clear means bright by deriva- 
tion. Is a thing alive if it is bright?" "No, sir, 
not necessarily." "Then 'clear' will not help us. 
What does 'vivid' mean?" Watkins hesitated. 
"What is its derivation?" Watkins still hesi- 
tated, so while he stood, the question was referred 
to others informally, and it was soon found that 
by etymology "vivid" means "living," not an ex- 
planation but another word meaning the same 
thing. But Watkins thought that words made 
"vivid pictures." "Which is alive then, the word 
or the picture?" An audible smile here relieved 
the strain, and at this break the Professor took 
advantage of the moment and told us what 
Trench meant by "living powers." His few 
words went deep into the faculty of human 
speech, but were so strong and clear and true 
that I venture to say that no member of that class 
has forgotten them. 

" 'Like the dropping of scales from his eyes,' 
what is the allusion, Mr. Young?" Young arose, 
but at once took his seat again. Springer, a 
ministerial student, here made a "rush," telling 



108 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

us about Saul of Tarsus and his experience at 
Damascus. The whole substance of the story 
was drawn out. Another hint about reading, 
viz, in reading a little book like Trench one may 
have to dip into a hundred other books. 

" 'Like the acquiring of another sense,' what 
does that mean, Mr. Barber?" "A sense in addi- 
tion to those we have." "How many have 
we.?" And Barber could tell, and could name our 
five senses, another "rush" by the way. "What 
other sense might we have, Mr. King?" King 
is in doubt about it and prefers to sit down. So 
with Bryan and Swartz and Glover. Then, when 
we were all straining our thought, peering into 
vacancy for a new sense, came again a few keen, 
clear and strong words from the Professor, mak- 
ing us aware of the limitations of our senses, and 
of directions in which it is at least conceivable 
that we might have a larger access to the knowl- 
edge of things. In our preparation of the next 
lesson there was, you may be sure, a notable 
improvement in our method of reading. Pro- 
fessor March never lectured to us. He talked to 
us frequently in this way, always catching the 
psychological moment of keenest interest, when 
thought was alert, and all the avenues of intelli- 
gence clear and open ; then he would drop in these 
nuggets of truth, these judgments of wisdom, 
like germs in their possibilities of rapid growth. 
A thousand grateful tributes for these quiet 
talks rise from the hearts of his students. He 



PROFESSOR MARCH 109 

found his way so easily to the deepest facts of 
science, and with equal ease and impressive unc- 
tion to the deepest principles of life, down to the 
substance and value of knowledge of training and 
of culture. 

We talk much and hear more of the "practical" 
in education, of the "utilities" in courses of 
training; but I want to say that I have never 
known a man who had a truer and a firmer grip 
on the practical values in education, or a finer 
touch of finger on the pulse of our human life in 
its vital needs and issues, than the man who in 
1868, at Amherst college, delivered the Phi Beta 
Kappa address on "The Scholar of To-day." 

That was Professor Francis A. March. 

In that address, without knowing it very likely, 
and certainly without intending it, he drew his 
own portrait. Of course he couldn't but do so, 
for it was his ideal scholar, and toward that ideal, 
in his own life and labors he steadily advanced 
for the next forty years. 

He was a man of fine ideals. None held more 
firmly than he to the ideal of loyal service to 
humanity. While he was reading a strong pas- 
sage on this very subject from Emerson we have 
often, in Phi Beta Kappa, noted that his lip 
would quiver, his voice falter, his eyes moisten, 
and his hands so tremble that he could hardly 
hold the book; and the emotion of the reader 
touched us even morr than the thought of the 
writer. 



110 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

A modest man, modest but strong, with a large 
and worthy estimate of his office, and a solid re- 
alization of the sacred character and value of 
such a work as his — a work great in itself and 
great in the spirit and purpose with which it is 
done ; and when we come to reflect that our char- 
acter is the result of the methods we employ, and 
the spirit that animates us in doing our work, we 
see what a fund of loyalty and power such a man 
gathers to himself, what a grasp of things that 
are best, what a measure of faith and of that 
divine patience which is the supreme solvent of 
life's problems. 



XI 
INDELICACY IN LITERATURE 

Bringing out new and attractive editions of 
certain alleged "classics" of English literature 
raises anew the question as to what books are fit 
for popular reading, and what ones should be put 
out of reach on the reserve shelves of public 
libraries and never looked at. The moralists who 
take the law in their hands as against the money- 
making book-sellers have a summary way of set- 
tling the question; but the trouble with this 
method is that a good many of those who look 
on while the battle rages, feel a kind of sneaking 
desire to know how bad, after all, these books are. 
Pruriency is not checked but rather excited and 
guided into specific channels and they devise ways 
of getting hold of books secretly which they can- 
not get openly. 

Of course, indecency, which is nothing but sheer 

indecency, has no claim to toleration ; but if a 

book is classical, if it has a certain fame on its 

literary merits, that fact reconciles the literary 

classes to its more objectionable features. It 

is as if we should say, "we will not allow men to 

circulate vile chromos of nude figures, but 
111 



112 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

Titian's 'Venus' is quite another thing." Mar- 
lowe's dissolute character finds abundant expres- 
sion in his plays, but there is a kind of rude great- 
ness in him; and he stands in such a relation to 
the rise of the modem drama that his writings, 
the critics say, are entitled to a place among our 
books. 

Those whose ideas of literary propriety are 
formed upon our current reading, who find de- 
light in the clean pages of Dickens, Howells and 
Longfellow can form no adequate idea of the 
grossness of much of our earlier literature. Men 
and women seem to have delighted to hear all the 
incidents, drolleries, intrigues and vices of hu- 
man life plainly spoken of. In the times of Rich- 
ard II and Henry IV all England was reading 
or hearing the "Decameron" and laughing at its 
situations. In fact, as a nation, we were then 
following the fashions of Italy, as York says in 
the play: — 

"Report of fashion in proud Italy, 
Whose manners still our tardy, apish nation. 
Limps after in base imitation." 

And no courts of Europe were more luxurious 
or more licentious then, than those of Italy, es- 
pecially that at Milan. Among other fashions 
this one of writing and reading bad books came 
in: — 

"Lascivious meters to whose venom sound 
The open ear of youth doth always listen." 



INDELICACY IN LITERATURE 113 

When an Englishman takes on Italian manners 
the result is something phenomenal; at least the 
Italians think so, for they have a saying: "Inglese 
Italianto e un diabolo incarnato." Perhaps a 
similar opinion came to prevail even in England; 
at least they could not fail to see that the travel- 
ers were bringing home foreign vices with them ; 
and Ascham distinctly condemns the practice of 
sending young men to Italy for education, unless 
good monitors went with them. 

Was Byron then an Italianized Englishman? 
Surely Chaucer was not. He loved the southern 
poets, and entered with delight into their airy, 
joyous moods, got inspiration and material from 
them, but to the last and more and more he re- 
mained in seriousness and sturdy sense an Eng- 
lishman to the backbone. In point of delicacy 
and moral tone as well as grace, he is a vast im- 
provement upon Boccaccio, yet the "Canterbury 
Tales" reproduce for us only too faithfully the 
manners of a coarse and sensuous age. 

The books that best illustrate this trait of our 
literature are not much read now. Some of them 
have fallen into deserved oblivion, others are un- 
der the ban of a criticism inspired by a higher 
moral sentiment, and still others are practically 
sealed books except to scholars, being unintelli- 
gible by reason of the antiquated style and dic- 
tion. As for Shakespeare, he is above criticism 
on any ground that makes this or that trait the 
fashion. We read him without scruple in private, 



114 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

and on public occasions simply skip the coarse 
passages or tone them down to our more refined 
standards of taste. 

Shakespeare, however, is among the best of his 
time in this respect. Even Spenser, who brought 
his rich imagination to the treatment of sacred 
themes, and whose life and nature were singularly 
pure, must be expurgated for modem readers. It 
is in the dramatists, however, that indelicacy 
reaches its highest point. Greene, Marlowe, 
Beaumont and Fletcher, Decker, Webster and 
Massinger, vigorous, free and fierce, ready at 
any point to leap into extravagance of profanity 
or passion. Indeed if the actors would "tear a 
passion to tatters to split the ears of the ground- 
lings," the play-writers gave them plenty of pas- 
sion to tear. Every scene has a murder or some 
bloodcurdling atrocity. 

In the midst of all this there was much unclean- 
ness, not only in language but in action. The 
pageants too included obscene exhibitions. Those 
who heard the plays and saw the festive proces- 
sions and read the books of Queen Elizabeth's 
time, heard utterances and saw scenes but little 
better in point of purity than those of which we 
get glimpses in the pages of Juvenal. 

The Puritans put a stop to this, but there 
came another reaction with the Restoration and 
the turbid stream came to the surface again in 
Wycherly, Congreve and Farquhar. These and 
other such corrupters of literature and the stage 



INDELICACY IN LITERATURE 115 

did not go unrebuked. Jeremy Collier notably 
made a vigorous and heroic attack upon them in 
a treatise on the Profaneness and Immorality of 
the stage, the effect of which was to almost revo- 
lutionize public sentiment. The best rebuke, how- 
ever, has been the silent verdict of time and ad- 
vancing morals. Indecent works have dropped 
quietly out of thought and knowledge and only 
the pure survives. 

There has been a sure movement through the 
centuries from grossness toward refinement. 
Women have become not only readers but writers 
and actresses. Books are made for them and by 
them. The true spirit of chivalry, a growing 
regard for and delicacy toward woman prompts 
a fitting response to her presence in literary life 
and enables her to impress her own virtues upon 
language and thought as well as upon society. 

There are two phases of our present condition 
in this respect which claim notice. One is this 
fact of a substantial progress as compared with 
the past, in the direction of pure thinking, pure 
living and pure speech. The popular taste will 
not bear with the treatment of gross subjects, 
nor gross language in the treatment of any sub- 
ject, and there can be no question but that in this 
we have made a great gain for the cause of mor- 
ality. 

The other point is the tendency to erect con- 
ventional standards in language, so that we have 
more regard for the phrase than for the thing. 



116 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

It leads to a species of euphemism which can 
hardly be called a gain. It is often merely the 
word that is objectionable, not the thought, for 
that we try to express by another word which, 
while it has not this meaning may by some easy 
turn of the mind be made to convey it. 

Our language in its history shows a consider- 
able drift of meanings as a result of this habit. 
The word "lewd" once meant no more than un- 
learned. "Vulgar," "lust," "paramour," "mis- 
tress," etc., have a history of the same kind; so 
also that whole group enumerated by Trench, 
which he says : "Men have dragged downward 
with themselves and make more or less partakers 
of their own fall." 

We see in these the record of the tendency to be 
scrupulous in the choice of phrases, they having 
been used at first by a kind of euphemism to con- 
vey grosser ideas without offense, then gradually 
appropriated to such uses. 

This fashionable delicacy runs out to absurd 
extremes. Common words come to be shunned 
for their very commonness. We must call a 
"spade" by some more elegant name, and in this 
way a good many every-day home words that 
contribute so much to the vigor and expressive- 
ness of our language are passing out of polite 
use with a positive loss to speech. Max O'Rell 
in his good-natured satire remarks, that Eng- 
lish women are much more easily shocked by the 
name of a thing than by the thing itself, and 



INDELICACY IN LITERATURE 117 

characterizes the English tongue as "euphemis- 
tic," a language that uses undecided words and 
"always beats about the bush." I have no doubt 
that in many drawing-rooms, where these notions 
of delicacy prevail, to say "a meal of victuals" 
would be enough to put upon one the stamp of 
vulgarity. 

It is possible too that this fastidiousness may 
extend far enough to affect the makers of litera- 
ture, and thus set narrower limits to art, and 
even put genius under some restraint. In the ex- 
ercise of creative power, men need to be unfettered. 
All that is true must be open before them for 
their use. Humors, levities, even vices and sins 
as well as the higher and better features of life 
and character find a legitimate place in the best 
forms of art. 

The aim and effect may still be to elevate and 
purify; in fact if the truthful working up of 
the materials of nature into forms of beauty ever 
fails to have that effect, it is not because there 
are vicious characters and gross allusions, but 
because we stop at these, take them out of their 
relations and fail to see the work in its unity. 
"It is coarse in the subject-matter," says the Et- 
trick Shepherd of Pope's "Abelard and Eloise," 
"but, O, sirs ! powerfu' and pathetic in execu- 
tion ;" and the power is for good, and the pathos 
the genuine stirring of wholesome feeling. 

If the writer's fidelity to his subject is over- 
ruled by the dictation of material or form on the 



118 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

part of his readers, there must be distortion some- 
where, some affectation, some reserve, some cov- 
ering up of a forbidden element at which, per- 
haps neither the moral instinct nor the instinct 
of art would take offense. Chaucer's "Miller" is 
a "cherl," but he is in the Canterbury party and 
must tell his tale, and that is the poet's apology. 

"I pray. 
For Goddes loves as deem not that I say 
Of evil intent, but that I mote reherse 
Hir tales alia, al be they better or werse^ 
Or elles falsen som of my matire." 

lago is not too great a villain for the part he 
plays, but his villainy would not be half as vil- 
lainous if the core of it were not distrust of the 
virtue of women. Woman's fortress is her virtue ; 
man's is faith in her virtue ; but lago has no faith, 
he is dismantled, a loathsome wreck of manhood. 
The character would be but imperfectly drawn 
if this feature were not shown us, as it is, by his 
coarse speeches. He makes capital of his real 
character, and flings out his gross thoughts with 
a rudeness that sickens the sensitive Moor. And 
thus he plays his part. 

Hamlet's rude talk to the sweet Ophelia may 
be looked upon as a part of the unsolved prob- 
lem, which that great character presents, though 
most would be free to say that Shakespeare had 
better have omitted that part. Queen Elizabeth 
would see Falstaff in love, a passion of which this 



INDELICACY IN LITERATURE 119 

"huge hill of flesh" was utterly incapable, that 
is, in any true and honorable sense of the word; 
so the poet does the best he can in the "Merry 
Wives of Windsor." 

The thought arises then, that so far as a truly 
refined taste and a sense of real moral distinc- 
tions are the basis of our standards, there is no 
restraint upon genius nor any danger to morals ; 
but so far as our ideas are conventional, mere 
matters of fashion and affectation, the mincing 
proprieties of the parlor without the soul of moral 
sense, there may be both a restraint upon creative 
power and great danger to morals. 

The character of much of our late popular 
literature goes to show that we are too easily 
satisfied with the form of decorous language, for- 
getting that a gross thought may lurk in a decent 
phrase. It is here as in our spiritual conflicts — 
the devil may clothe himself as an angel of light. 

The most dangerous representation of impurity 
and vice is not where it stands out in the clear 
light, but where it comes almost to the surface, 
and is veiled with elegance of phrase just thick 
enough to hide all its deformity. The suggestion 
gives play to the imagination which, in the young 
especially, is only too ready to take fire and dart 
out to the very extreme in the direction of im- 
purity. 

Much depends upon the writer's power. He 
may raise us to higher regions of thought and 
experience and rouse feelings such that any low 



120 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

suggestion would be impertinent if not impossible. 
King Lear can start no commonplace associa- 
tions. 

Much too may depend upon the writer's man- 
ner and motive, upon whether or not he writes 
with a conscience. 

One feels no protection from the author's con- 
science in reading Dryden, or Swift, or Byron. 
"If you find anything bad here, make the most 
of it," is what we seem to read between the lines. 
Sterne will sacrifice dignity and decency alike, to 
raise a roar of laughter. He must move you, if 
in no other way he will mount the pulpit and in- 
stead of saying "let us pray," will toss his peri- 
wig at your head. We pass along from chapter 
to chapter in "Tristram Shandy" with a feeling 
not unlike that with which we watch the antics 
of a monkey. "What queer thing will he do 
next?" 

How different was Goldsmith! There is mat- 
ter in the "Vicar of Wakefield" that we should 
say must be handled with great delicacy, yet we 
see no trace of effort. With perfect frankness, 
ease, and purity the whole story is told. George 
McDonald and George Eliot have equal frank- 
ness and delicacy if not the same quaint sim- 
plicity. Becky Sharp is a fallen woman if ever 
there was one, yet there is no passage in "Vanity 
Fair" to which the most innocent and impressible 
nature may not turn without the least fear of 
contamination, 



INDELICACY IN LITERATURE 121 

To see vice and coarseness cannot harm one 
morally if he is made to turn from it with a 
shudder of disgust ; but to dress impurity up and 
make it seem attractive, to lead you almost up 
to it and make you wish to go further, as so many 
of the novelists do, is indeed to endanger morals. 
We should wisely discriminate and give no li- 
cense to 

"That soft persuasive art 
That can without the least offense impart 
The loosest wishes to the chastest heart." 



XII 

BOOKS TO BE READ BEFORE 
GRADUATION 

Anyone who goes far enough to make serious 
inquiry about what books to read is not likely 
to go astray for want of advice on that score; 
for there is substantial agreement about a few 
great books, and the recognition of their excel- 
lence is widespread. At this stage of the inquiry 
it seems to me somewhat more important to touch 
upon matters connected with the purpose and 
method of reading. 

It would be a gain if students could earlier 
learn to regard the great books about which 
much college works centers, as other than mere 
school books, — Milton, Bacon, Spenser, Goethe, 
Lessing, Moliere, Homer, Plato, Xenophon, 
Cicero, Horace, Tacitus. That change comes 
sooner or later to anyone who is to receive much 
benefit or pleasure from the best literature, and 
so I am in the habit of asking the boys not to 
sell their college books, and to dust them occa- 
sionally even after graduation. It is rather 
strange that such advice should be necessary, but 

it has been, and to some slight degree is even 
122 



BOOKS TO BE READ 123 

yet. It seems like sacrilege to dicker away one's 
college Homer or Horace for a paltry half-dollar. 

That is a great day in a student's experience, 
when some passage — perhaps a single line — from 
one of the old poets, or some glowing period from 
the old orators or historians, lifts him suddenly 
to the realization that these college task books 
are the sources of a mighty inspiration. 

So I would say learn to read the books of the 
curriculum, so far as they are books to be read, 
and cultivate a preference for one or another as 
it may make a special appeal to you by its form, 
its thought, or its suggestions, thus laying the 
foundation for a more thorough study of it as a 
part of your life habit. 

Such a hold upon a single book often proves 
to be an ample intellectual resource. It is not 
quantity but quality that tells in education. 
"Read much but not many works," says Sir Wil- 
liam Hamilton. If the object is to specialize 
and get together knowledge about any particular 
subject, — that requires reading of another kind, 
and must be spoken of separately. That pre- 
supposes general culture, or the two processes 
may well go on together ; but in general, broad 
knowledge is not promoted by wide reading, but 
by close and studious reading; and for this pur- 
pose ten books would be better than a hundred, 
and possibly I may say that three would be bet- 
ter than ten. 

It may be well to make a note here of what 



IM HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

we mean by reading. Much of our talk about 
it sounds as though it were a simple and rapid 
process, and that reading a book were to go 
through it in this way, glancing over its sen- 
tences once for all. With many books that is 
true; but with those here considered the method 
should be very different. Comprehension is the 
point, and these great books are not mastered 
at a glance. Their truths are too large to be 
conveyed immediately from the page to the mind, 
or even from one mind to another by speech. We 
find constantly that readers go over passages 
without getting more than a glint of the thought, 
sometimes not even that. We get on by train- 
ing, so as to read better ; but ordinarily we come 
up to great truth slowly — by leaps now and then, 
it may be, but creeping for the most part — to- 
ward it at first, then nearer and nearer by repeti- 
tion until we get to it, — that is apprehension; 
then, if we are capable and keep on, we get around 
it and above, seeing it from many sides, — that 
is more like comprehension. 

Great books must therefore be carefully read, 
read time and again, if what is in them is really 
to be transferred to the mind and there be 
wrought out into ideal shapes. That is what 
makes them educational. This gradual catch- 
ing of great meanings is a wonderful developer 
of intellectual power. It feeds, too, as well as 
exercises. 

Speaking of working out the materials of lit- 



BOOKS TO BE READ 125 

erature into ideal shapes brings up in another 
way the suggestion that mere reading is not 
enough. If one tells us he has read Emerson's 
essays on "Manners" and "Civilization," it may 
mean much or it may mean little. The impli- 
cation would, however, naturally be that he had 
read them and therefore knew what was in them. 
Even supposing that to be true, knowledge is not 
all. Such reading is for discipline and discipline 
in its results is partly knowledge, partly readi- 
ness of thought and judgment, partly the ca- 
pacity for noble action. Here is where reading 
touches or should touch that inner fiber which 
we call character. We do not read a book merely 
to know what is in it, or even to be able to tell 
what is in it, but also to construct for ourselves 
ideals which shall be guides in our thinking and 
living. 

Another point of great importance is that we 
should learn to take in a writer's truth just as 
he means it — undistorted. The power to do that 
makes a very good measure of one's capacity to 
receive the highest benefit from education. In 
this we find great differences. Some men are so 
intensely preoccupied that it seems impossible to 
displace their own thoughts, and books in conse- 
quence make little impression upon them. We 
read our own ideas into the pages before us. 

I know a man who has been a close and careful 
student for forty years. He has a hobby, how- 
ever, and is perhaps what we should call a 



126 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

"crank." At any rate he deliberately reads his 
own pet theories into every text he opens. That 
is an extreme case, but we are all tainted with 
that malady. We close our minds to any but 
our own truth. That we recognize with some fi- 
delity, but aU the rest we either ignore, or give 
it some sort of relevancy to our sphere of inter- 
ests by distortion. 

A clear eye and an alert and unbiased mind — 
that's what we want in reading. As Lucretius 
says to Memmius, apply to true philosophy ears 
disengaged {vacua^ auris), a mind keenly alert 
(cmimumque sagacem)^ and free from cares 
(semotum a curis). 

I am not speaking now specifically of preju- 
dice, though it is very important to be free from 
that, — to read both sides and all sides with even 
candor, and to give hospitable welcome to facts 
and opinions that are not like our own, I am 
speaking rather of preoccupation, and that 
inherent human weakness of ours, narrowness 
of interest. Such narrowness limits the field 
upon which our powers of mind have vivid 
play. 

Here we are again, right on ground where 
moral and intellectual culture go hand in hand; 
for this narrowness is essentially immoral. It 
results from the supremacy of self, and interest 
in the things that appeal to self. 

Take memory for example. It is one of the 
powers of the intellect, as we say, and yet moral 



BOOKS TO BE READ 127 

traits very largely determine its qualities, — not 
so much in its retentive power, but in the kind 
of things remembered. Everyone has a memory 
good for some things, — events, date^j, forms, 
persons, places, words, thoughts, principles, in 
general; or these and many trivial matters as 
they may come home to self, — his own plans, 
conquests, doings, grievances, — how long some 
people can remember a grudge ! — hardships, 
slights, mistakes, what is due him, or what has 
been paid him that was not due. There is in 
most of us an overweening self which becomes 
unconsciously the center of a little circle, and 
whatever comes within that circle is eagerly 
caught up and tenaciously held. 

Now in education and in that self-culture here 
considered, the point is to open the mind, and 
to impart to things worth remembering the same, 
or an equal interest with these trivial belong- 
ings. In many cases this is a difficult task. 
Selfishness is multiform, and so subtle in many 
of its forms, that while it may not appear, it will 
yet be working to make our minds impervious 
and prevent any enlargement of the range of 
interests. Many a learner brightens up with an 
interest apparently genuine, but which turns out 
to be another head of the hydra. The fact ap- 
pealed in some way to the old love, and the pupil 
had not really been bom again. Regeneration, 
intellectual as well as spiritual, is the dethrone- 
ment of self. 



128 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

Let me here quote a few words from Dr. Chan- 
ning to the same effect: 

"A man who rises above himself looks from an emi- 
nence on nature and providence, on society and life. 
Thought expands, as by a natural elasticity, when the 
pressure of selfishness is removed. The moral and 
religious principles of the soul generously cultivated, 
fertilize the intellect. Duty faithfully performed 
opens the mind to truth, both being of one family, 
alike immutable, universal and everlasting." 

By the way, that I may not close without 
recommending a single book outside the curric- 
ulum, let me suggest the works of William El- 
lery Channing as a book that every student should 
read. 



XIII 
COLLEGE FRATERNITIES 

It is a curious fact that college fraternities 
had their origin in a period of intense hostility 
to all secret societies. That hostility grew out 
of the anti-Masonic crusade, which followed the ab- 
duction of William Morgan in 1826. During the 
next few years these Greek letter societies sprung 
up rapidly in our eastern institutions. They were 
forbidden. Colleges expelled the members of 
them when known ; they lived, however, and throve 
in spite of persecution, perhaps partly by reason 
of it. They grew in concealment. Students 
promised not to join them, but they did join 
them. They wore badges, but in public the 
badges were pinned inside the vest pocket. They 
juggled, doubtless, with questions of conscience 
and duty. They resorted to casuistries and quib- 
bles, which now, when recalled, seem like pleasant 
jests, but then, no doubt, served a serious pur- 
pose. 

I find in our own records some evidences of 

this antagonism, the main foe being the faculty. 

"Not even the ban of that learned body," says 

the historian at one point, "or the hostility of 
129 



130 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

people at large was able to prevent the further- 
ance of real good." 

The element of secrecy seemed to be the main 
objection, as though secrecy were in itslf bad 
and sure to be a cloak for bad conduct. 

It would seem absurd to suppose that any 
group of average young fellows, not to say chosen 
fellows, would deliberately combine and make a 
secret bond to promote immoral ends. We must 
think better of our brothers, and if possible, bet- 
ter of our kind. Not every secret imagination 
even, is an unclean one. Not every hidden pur- 
pose of the individual heart is sinister or selfish. 
Men have good thoughts and good purposes as 
well. 

We shall deal more fairly with the fact of se- 
crecy if we remember the innocent fondness of 
youth for mystery ; and also the fact that at any 
time of life there are certain hopes and ideals 
that are so intensely personal, so a part of the life 
within that we guard them with instinctive deli- 
cacy. 

There may have been other objections to fra- 
ternities ; indeed, some faint echoes of other ob- 
jections may still be heard, as that they foster 
a spirit of exclusiveness, that they break up the 
natural bonds of fellowship between students of 
the same institution or the same class. 

We do not find it so at Lafayette. The men 
of these brotherhoods have free and friendly in- 
tercourse, and men who do not belong to any 



COLLEGE FRATERNITIES 131 

fraternity mingle in cordial relations with the 
men of all fraternities. Social life on the campus 
seems now, in this respect, very much what it was 
in my own college days. It was no uncommon 
thing for our brothers to have among their close 
friends men of other fraternities and men of no 
fraternity. 

In the period following the Civil War there 
was a change of attitude toward these Greek- 
letter societies — from hostility to tolerance, from 
tolerance to open recognition, from recognition 
to high favor — until during these last few years 
they have become one of the most important fac- 
tors of our college life, contributing in the most 
natural and easy way to the solution of very 
difficult problems, — the dormitory problem for 
one. You may see it here upon the campus — 
students comfortably and cozily lodged in chap- 
ter houses. The problem of college government ; 
the problem of maintaining the spirit of faith- 
ful and honest work; and more important still, 
the problem of personal influence upon individuals, 
known to be the best element of our education. 

The professors used to hold that key, but they 
have lost it, especially in our larger colleges and 
universities, by the overwhelming increase of num- 
bers and subdivision of courses of instruction. A 
man may pass through one of our larger col- 
leges, I am told, without acquaintance with pro- 
fessors, without any of that vital personal touch 
with the best men of the Faculty, which might be 



132 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

to them a source of inspiration and strength. 

In part, this loss is made up by personal con- 
tact among students themselves, and this contact 
is at its best where we have the brotherly and 
sympathetic association of kindred natures. 

The fraternity gives also, in this respect, the 
added advantage of intimate relations with its 
graduate members. At commencements and on 
great college occasions they come back in the 
years of their strength, they bring with them 
their larger experience and their warm hearts, 
to renew their youth in the magic circle of the 
college brotherhood. They get their warmest 
greeting at the chapter house, and it is here that 
they give their best in personal touch and in- 
fluence. 

Not only so, but resident alumni are always at 
hand and keep up a keen interest in the welfare 
of their younger brothers. We have in this an 
invaluable source of mature and thoughtful in- 
fluence, and almost always exerted to raise the 
mental and moral tone of the fraternity. 

Our youngest brothers keep themselves con- 
scious of the higher aims of this organization — 
good fellowship, good morals, and fine personal 
qualities. We have none of the modern aff^ecta- 
tion of contempt for scholarship, for we are stu- 
dents, and we know that scholarship is one of the 
noblest fruits of student life; but we put char- 
acter above everything else. We aim to develop 
our younger brothers in social qualities that have 



COLLEGE FRATERNITIES 133 

the deepest value — to develop them "through in- 
timate relations with a limited number of con- 
genial friends who are bound together in an 
organization where loyalty, truth, honor and fra- 
ternal affection are the guiding principles." 

I here draw near to precious "secrets" with 
which I may not freely deal to-day, but the secret 
that gives us life and power will be found to be 
one common to all true and noble hearts. 

This institution has to be interpreted in view 
of its fundamental aim to promote brotherly kind- 
ness. In that we do well, for we get pretty near 
the enduring foundations in human relationship 
when we get upon that rock bottom of brotherly 
love. 

Remember, these are the years of rapid growth 
in character and of kindling ideals. To me one 
of the joys of this association was the opportu- 
nities which it gave me for uplift in directions 
suggested by the character and the achievements 
of the men about me. 

There is no finer experience in life than that 
keen sense of strength and victory which comes 
to a youth when he reaches out and lays hold of 
ideals and presently finds that he is by them lifted 
to better levels. 

We do not forget that there are both good 
and bad ideals, and it is quite possible that in our 
chapters there may at times be men of question- 
able character and aims, whose influence might 
be bad, but I have great confidence in the choices 



134 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

of young men of normal vigor and intelligence, 
especially when their choices may be guided by 
those who have their welfare deeply at heart. 

I love to think of young men with faces up- 
ward turned to the rising levels of life, ready for, 
as they are capable of, sudden uplifting. 

We leap upward — thank God! and are at once 
at home in better surroundings. We creep down- 
ward. And even when we are lured along the 
descending way by agreeable self-indulgence the 
whole atmosphere of a lower situation is striking 
and offensive to us, and we stay there — if we stay 
— reluctantly. 

That is our hope, brothers. The best oratory 
is none too good for the meanest of us, nor the 
best music, nor the best art, nor the best culture. 

We are dealing with that which has in it mighty 
possibilities of receiving and responding to good 
influence when we are dealing with the spirit of 
youth with its idealism and its high ambitions. 

Raise a young man to better social conditions 
than he has been accustomed to and there will 
be an expansive thrill of adaptation that will 
make him instantly at home. Given a sudden 
uplift in culture or in art, and the soul flutters 
with the joy of a new possession, within a new 
and congenial environment ; but you can't go 
downward either in society, in culture, or in art, 
without a chill. This is true in every field of ex- 
perience where you have to do with the spirits 
of men. 



COLLEGE FRATERNITIES 135 

I will maintain optimism, therefore, against all 
who come, basing my belief upon this one truth 
of human nature, that we rise to a better life 
with a thrilling sense of strength and victory; 
and we sink to a worse life, stung with a sense 
of moral defeat. It is such considerations that 
bring home to us the opportunities of good that 
offer within this sacred circle. If there are 
weak brothers, erring brothers, there are strong 
ones too ; and one strong man in a chapter may 
lay his hand — nay, lay his love, on any brother 
and win him to the better way. 

I spoke just now of the "sacred circle" and a 
little before of the "magic circle." We instinct- 
ively select strong words to express that which 
passes from life to life in such relationship, yet 
these words are not strong enough. The old 
wonder tales in their use of magic, made proph- 
ecy that has been more than fulfilled before our 
eyes. A little scientific investigation, for ex- 
ample, the mastery of a few laws of nature and 
their use, has accomplished results, in comparison 
with which the genii of magicians are insignifi- 
cant. 

The lamp of Aladdin, the rugs of Houssain, and 
the golden apple of Ahmed are like children's toys 
when compared with the achievements of modem 
human art in the direction of the rapid creation 
of wealth, of transportation, of the lightning 
flight of intelligence, and the healing of disease. 
And greater works than these can we do in the 



136 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

realm of spirit — in the working out of human 
lives — in giving power to the weak and ambition 
to the dull, in those transformations of the ignoble 
into the noble, of rudeness into refinement, of in- 
capacity into skill and readiness and power. 

Such are the tasks that are set before us and 
that should fire our hearts with zeal in the cause 
of Tau Kappa Phi. Do I set the standard too 
high? Well, it is the very nature of an ideal 
that it should be in advance of our actual attain- 
ments. We want it to draw us onward and up- 
ward. This is not a social union only, for mirth, 
or entertainment, or conversation, or festive en- 
joyment — the mere intercourse of comrades; it is 
a fellowship of a high order, in which each min- 
isters of his best to his fellows, each finds his 
pleasure in promoting the best fruits of brotherly 
love. 

And so we come back to the point from which 
we started — ^brotherly love. We may well be re- 
minded by that phrase that our fraternity is 
not an end in itself, but is educational, and there- 
fore a means to a larger end. We should make it 
a stepping stone to that wider brotherhood to 
which we all belong, and the realization of which 
we should all promote — the brotherhood of man. 



XIV 
TOWN AND GOWN 

There are of course, differences between col- 
lege life and town life. A measure of separation 
from the outside world is a fact here, and leads 
to distinctions inevitable and for the most part 
desirable. The circumstances give college boys 
the advantage in most respects. The community 
is compact and isolated, so that organization and 
the resulting benefits come easily and naturally. 
Take the matter of recreation : College students 
can make better music, for example, than will 
ordinarily be heard among an equal number of 
young men in town life; better jokes; they have 
better methods of getting and spending holidays ; 
they have better games, for the discipline is more 
thorough and there is less vulgarity and ill-feel- 
ing in their contests. To my mind, when class 
meets class or college meets college on the ball 
field — pluck against pluck and skill against skill 
— we have a kind of ideal field sport. 

Then there are social differences to be noted. 
Students have better social clubs, and the spirit 
springing from class and college associations be- 
gets a prevalent feeling of good fellowship which 
137 



138 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

will not be found in an equal degree in town life. 

On the intellectual side, too, there are wide dis- 
tinctions. To say nothing now of the courses 
of study which make up the regular business of 
the student, there is access to books and the pres- 
ence of competent helpers. Outside of required 
work students have good societies for literary 
and scientific training. Their outside reading, 
too, is more systematic and judicious. 

Further, on the moral side, still more impor- 
tant distinctions appear. College life presents 
the opportunity of shaping the outlines of char- 
acter in an atmosphere as free as possible from 
perverting and mercenary influences. Students 
as a rule get to have clear convictions based upon 
honest sentiments. They may not be always 
right; it would be too much to say of any body 
of men, old or young, that they are always and 
infallibly right. But they are honest and candid 
in their convictions, and that which they are to 
approve must come to them with the stamp of 
sincerity and integrity upon it. 

Clear convictions are not common enough 
among young men to make this a diff^erence of 
slight moment. Mr. By-ends, of Bunyan's time, 
with his rich kindred, as Mr. Smooth-man, Mr. 
Facing-both-ways and Mr. Anything, have 
spawned a numerous progeny upon this age, and 
they stand in the public walks of business and 
politics, as well as in religion, ready to turn aside, 
or go back or forward in the train of any master 



TOWN AND GOWN 139 

who wears silver slippers. It is a good thing to 
let young men form moral habits under circum- 
stances such that they can discuss and decide their 
questions under the light of the best sentiments 
and the noblest states of mind. 

These are a few of the distinctions which pre- 
sent the best side of college life and which cannot 
be outwardly marked. They appear only when 
the facts are known. 

As to conventional outward distinctions, such 
as wearing peculiar dress, carrying canes and 
the like, they are comparatively indifferent and 
are questions to be decided partly as matters of 
taste and partly of expense. Oxford hats are 
certainly unique and picturesque and have a 
scholastic air. No serious objection could be made 
to the introduction of such a fashion, unless it 
should seem undesirable to impose a new item of 
expense on the members of the class. 

Without discussing particular fashions, how- 
ever, two general considerations cause me to look 
with some regret upon the introduction of new 
customs which widen the difference between the 
little college world and the great world without. 
One, that the effect of these customs so often is 
to put emphasis, both in college and out, upon 
those features of college life which are not the 
best. The great public, so far as it is at all in- 
terested in us, will not come here and sit down to 
a careful observation of our modes of life and 
work, but will form its impressions of us from 



140 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

those traits of our life which we ourselves make 
conspicuous. 

The annual "bowl fight" at a neighboring Uni- 
versity does more in all probability to determine 
the average public impression of university life in 
that city than any whole month of regular stu- 
dent work there. The same may be said of the 
annual burnings and burials of books. I do not 
say that impressions thus formed are correct, but 
they are facts. A little hazing gives us a bad 
name ; so, too, a rough and brutal method of play- 
ing foot-ball, or an exhibition in the cars or 
streets or other public places of conduct more 
than usually eccentric and demonstrative. The 
most casual reader of the newspapers cannot fail 
to see to what an extent the whole system of lib- 
eral education is judged in certain quarters, not 
from the kind of men our colleges turn out, or 
from the kind of work students do, but from the 
impression they make in their observance of gro- 
tesque traditional customs and in their jolly hours 
of freedom. 

The other thought is that with the increase 
of conventional distinctions, there grows up an 
artificial environment in which students form hab- 
its of living and ideas of life which disqualify 
many for the actual conditions which the world 
presents. 

It is said of the English universities that they 
turn out many sporting gentlemen who are un- 
fitted for the serious pursuits of the business 



TOWN AND GOWN 141 

world; and that in general the graduates have 
formed habits of living which make any income 
less than five thousand pounds too small for them. 
It is not long ago that Mr. Depew said there were 
three thousand college graduates starving in New 
York city. If this is so, and if they are starving 
because they are graduates, how does college life 
clip the sinews of manly strength! Not because 
they study Greek instead of German, or the Calcu- 
lus instead of Chemistry, but because they live 
four years in another world and fail to acquire 
the power of adjusting themselves to the con- 
ditions of actual life. The world is strange to 
them. The college took them up out of it at 
one point and puts them down at another where 
the surroundings are new. 

Fortunately we may say that the tone and 
traits of our college life are mainly determined 
by young men who are earnest and who are seri- 
ously preparing for work. It would not be amiss, 
however, if students at all our colleges were 
watchful upon these points, viz: to see that their 
amusements, jokes and other doings remain ra- 
tional and manly, and such as will not call forth 
the unfriendly criticism of serious-minded people : 
and that they do not fall out of sympathy with 
the ways of the outside world or its wholesome 
ambitions. 

While it is well to be so far separate as to be 
able to pursue study free from the cares of busi- 
ness, and, perhaps, also from the distractions of 



142 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

social life at home, it is not well, upon this dif- 
ference, to form new sets of habits which lessen 
our power to cope with the "stem realities." 
That world, after all, is where we must do our 
work and win our victories. If it yields its hold 
upon us for a time, we should none the less note 
the pulse that beats in its strong hand, a hand 
that will presently close upon us with a grip all 
the more firm because we have had a period of 
freedom to prepare for its pressure. 



XV 

THE EASY CHAIR 

Looking back in leisurely retrospect, in the tem- 
per of one who has passed the examinations, last 
term was a very good one — good in many ways, — 
quiet in the first place; for the playful hostility 
of classes had been softened by friendly inter- 
course, to a feeling that was much better than 
mere tolerance of each other. The heroes of '99, 
and those of '00 marched to their class suppers 
cheered rather than molested. Verily it is a good 
thing to see these brethren dwelling together, and 
working side by side in peace and unity. 

Quiet in the second place, because we had no 
games at which we could make the welkin ring 
with our shouts : and so we had a chance to think 
over our victories. W^e did rehearse them in many 
a quiet evening hour, and felt a warming sense 
of satisfaction in them — something akin to pride, 
yet not vainglorious boasting; for we should be 
a poor lot if we could not catch the contagion 
of a more manly spirit than that from the most 
modest team we ever had. 

But those were great games. Never mind the 

scores just now, — but the way they were played, 
143 



144 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

— the pluck, the determination, the undaunted 
spirit; the being stronger under discourage- 
ments. There were plays of which the twentieth 
memory is enough to kindle again our old en- 
thusiasm. 

Then our indoor life didn't allow us to forget 
that we still have muscle and agility. There were 
the mid-winter sports in the gymnasium, where 
the spectator could see men kicking well up to- 
ward the rafters, and could see that boxing is 
not all done with the mouth. 

Then the Glee Club made a good beginning, 
well followed up in the vacation trip. It was a 
good term for musical practice, and this plays 
a larger and better part in college life as time 
goes on. Last term any walker on Pardee ter- 
race, in the late afternoon when recitations were 
over, could hear a chorus, or catch now and then 
strains from the band, a little discordant, per- 
haps at times, but improving from day to day; 
and even at its worst how infinitely better than 
the howls and horn blowing with which the leisure 
of students might be filled in the old times. 

Then the Alumni reunions and banquets in 
Philadelphia, — ^when the fires were rekindled and 
the life blood of old Lafayette went tingling out 
to the finger tips. 

Then the class-room work and the study lamp 
— it was a good term for that; and that's the 
real thing. We may talk little of it, and catch 
only now and then a hint of it in college life as it 



THE EASY CHAIR 145 

appears in the newspapers, especially in college 
newspapers ; but our real purposes, our real am- 
bitions and real hopes center about the proper 
work of the college. It was a good term in the 
main, in all the laboratories, in the English room, 
in the Greek and Latin rooms. Good hours for 
us are those we give to Milton, to Plato, to genial 
Horace, and those fervent songs with which the 
early church resounded. 

One drawback was those breaks in health which 
can be avoided in winter only by care, and the 
jolly college boy is a stranger to care. There 
was a good deal of real sickness. Possibly also 
some that is known as "college sickness," but 
it is reassuring to see a plucky fellow, when he 
has sprained his ankle, hobble up two long flights 
of stairs on crutches, so as not to miss recitation ! 
Many a fellow was in the class-room wheezing 
and coughing when he should have been bundled 
up in bed drinking catnip tea, or some other of 
mother's good remedies. But while we are speak- 
ing of "should have been's," we may go further 
back and say, they should not have caught the 
colds. 

Was I speaking of drawbacks? Well let by- 
gones be bygones for the most part; but before 
the genial optimism of good weather, good wheel- 
ing, good walking, fresh foliage, fair flowers and 
base-ball victories, has us completely shielded un- 
der its silver canopy, let us have one more good 
growl at the college paths. What with light 



146 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

snows, light frosts thawing noonday's, and the 
composition of the paths themselves, how per- 
sistently sloppy they have been! And what a 
variety of sloppiness — from melting snow, 
through thin muddy paste, down to the consistency 
of sticky clay well wet, that clings to your shoes 
and won't be shaken off, or scraped off, but when 
dry the next morning, will fall off, of its own 
weight, to be trodden into your Brussels carpet! 
Three, four, half a dozen times a day, three 
hundred of us more or less, have walked these 
trails of mortar, to dinner and back, to supper 
and back, to recitation and back, — but have had 
our thoughts too firmly fixed on "higher things," 
to be much incommoded after all by such trifles. 
Yet, these very paths are sceleris vestigia nostri, 
and are proof enough, if proof were needed, that 
the "rolling years" have not yet brought back 
the golden millennial day. 

A good term for reflection too, with many oc- 
casions that invited it, and many opportunities 
for it. A good season to take in the seeds of 
truth and warm them into vitality in the soil 
of our thinking. And how an idea does grow 
when thus rooted and tended — rising and taking 
us with it upward and outward in its growth. 

Student life is an atmosphere of thinking. 
There are the lecture rooms with their teaching 
and their enthusiasms — communicable; there are 
great books, their pages bristling with thoughts. 
It lifts our natures a little even to feel their 



THE EASY CHAIR 147 

covers; but to have them opened and expounded, 
to have them at our elbows, to read and study 
them, to ponder over them as we sit in the easy 
chair, to talk them over at the fireside of a friend 
— what a life to live! bringing home to us, the 
blessed realization of our littleness and our power, 
and the greatness of truth, and all the time the 
great light flashing its gleams to us under the 
lifting mists. 

And the prayer hall, and the fellowship of fer- 
vent hearts in praise and petition. And the 
chapel pulpit, with its message of peace and in- 
spiration. No message is more welcome to us 
than this, if it be genuine. Such were those we 
had last term, from our own preachers, from 
Bishop Rulison — a strong man, assuring us again 
of the strength and security of the Christian 
faith; from General Eaton, ripe in manifold ex- 
perience, testifying to the supreme utility of dis- 
cipline and religious training, from Mr. 
Jenanyan, the Armenian, telling us of conse- 
cration. Mr. Studd could not come to us. Was 
it a judgment upon us for the advertising we 
gave him a "cricket player" and an "athlete"? 
If a man be sincere and earnest, and have God's 
true message in his life and his voice, that is 
enough. If his theme be the deepening of the 
spiritual life, we shall be glad to hear him for that 
alone. These are the first, the last, and the best 
interests and need not be commended to us by an 
appeal to anything lower. 



XVI 

SOME FREAKS OF COLLEGE SENTIMENT 

Much that passes for student sentiment is not 
the average of actual opinion and feeling among 
the fellows, but an average of what is most ob- 
trusive and outspoken among them. Thus a false 
sentiment may seem to spring up from the feeling 
of a few, if the few are loud in the expression of 
it, and set it forth in phrases that are pat and 
catchy. It is only within recent years, for ex- 
ample, that we have heard the word "stuff" com- 
monly used to designate the subject-matter of any 
and every study. All the mathematics are "stuff" 
now, German also, Anglo-Saxon, Strength of Ma- 
terials, Chemistry, Histology, Homer, Horace, 
Shakespeare, even the Sermon on the Mount is 
"stuff" when the subject of study, and marked 
off in tasks. 

It must have started with some fellow who felt 
no interest in his task, and found it irksome, un- 
intelligible, and at last unendurable. We can see 
him fling it aside in disgust, and his simple ejacu- 
lation, "Stuff," was so shrewdly expressive that it 
struck a sympathetic chord in the experience of 

many another. The word may now be taken to 
14,8 



FREAKS OF COLLEGE SENTIMENT 149 

indicate a general attitude and feeling toward 
study — expressing therefore a quasi sentiment ; 
and the worst of it is, that the very phrase has 
helped to create and crystallize the sentiment. 

The word is not in every instance used with 
conscious disparagement, but it shades that way, 
and will seldom be heard without the suggestion 
of that reproach which attaches to the worst mean- 
ing of "stuff," viz, "worthless matter," "trash." 

Suppose some fellow, instead of disgust, had 
felt a thrill of pleasant appreciation over his 
Goethe or his calculus, and was so delighted with 
the results in working out a passage or a problem 
that in the moment of his victory he exclaimed 
"Pure gold!" as though he had found a treasure. 
Think of the sentiment that might arise if there 
were the same contagion of feeling as in the other 
case! 

These two extremes mark the limits between 
which sentiment upon college studies may vibrate 
— ^with a main tendency to the lower point we 
might suppose; but here again we should most 
likely be misled by the outspokenness of the mi- 
nority. Most students take a genuine interest in 
their studies. Many are fond of them. They do 
not proclaim their love from the housetops, how- 
ever. In fact the regular, diligent and virtuous 
student has no chronicler. The public is more 
interested in the other fellows — they are piquant 
and they get into the papers. 

It would be a great gain if, in those estimates 



150 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

that underlie college sentiment, the true interests 
of college life could have their real value. There 
is very little uncertainty as to what those inter- 
ests are, even in the minds of the most thoughtless. 
The purpose of going to college is mainly served 
by the course of study. Recreations are both 
pleasant and necessary; it is well now and then 
to have a good time ; the fellowships of the campus 
are delightful, and various student interests come 
in incidentally and serve a good purpose too, but 
we defeat the main end of a course in higher edu- 
cation when we regard the obligations of study 
as in some way an interference with our real 
business and wishes. 

I have thought of this in connection with cer- 
tain items and articles in The Touchstone. With 
that clever writer "Breezy Bill," study seems an 
impertinence. He flouts scholarly ambition, 
sneers at college honors, and in general dispar- 
ages diligence — a strange attitude for a serious 
man. The fact is, he is not serious. Most of 
what he says is merely a conventional concession 
to that kiddish sentiment of aversion to work, 
which, whatever its following, finds large voice 
in the school and college world. 

Seen through that atmosphere, duty has no 
charms except for milksops and "grinds." Dis- 
cipline and recurring tasks are forms of weariness 
that seem but dim and distant as seen through the 
smoke that jolly fellows make in their hours of 
freedom. 



FREAKS OF COLLEGE SENTIMENT 151 

"The Poler is an Animal," says our writer, "of 
unlimited capacity for study. Books are his com- 
panions ; problems his delight. . . . Friends 
are of small consequence to him. . . . Earthly 
joy is complete when engaged in polishing the 
questions of the quiz, or the shoes of the pro- 
fessor — heavenly when listening to a didactic ser- 
mon in the chapel." So the poor "poler" goes on 
allowing "his body and his social nature to 
atrophy," — wheels whirling in his deluded head. 

But from time to time, through the rings of 
curling smoke there come saner glimpses. "Yet 
eliminating all prejudice for the time, any sane- 
minded person must acknowledge that the poler 
is forming habits which will be of value to him 
when he has flown from under the wings of his 
Alma Mater. He studies hard and regularly. 
The continual effort to be perfect in his studies 
tends to render him accurate, painstaking and 
industrious." 

The writer confesses that the "poler" is con- 
demned by students, "not so much for studying 
all the time, as because the poler surpasses them 
in the same work, by studying while they are en- 
gaged in some kind of recreation." 

This freak sentiment of hostility to study there- 
fore is one of which the writer does not seriously 
approve. That which he lays aside to get 
glimpses of the real truth is a "prejudice." 

It seems a pity to create a sentiment that con- 
demns honest work; or to give currency to ideals 



152 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

that handicap serious young fellows with a dis- 
paraging epithet. "Grind" is a hard name in 
college parlance. A fellow must be made of strong 
stuff not to wince under it. It may make little 
difference to those who can stand it, but the 
great harm comes to the scores of fellows who are 
not so strong, whose attitude toward serious work 
may be wholly determined by their fear of in- 
curring such a reproach. 

Can it be that good students must often make 
a secret of their diligence, and thus carry water 
on both shoulders? Alas, that any man in college 
should ever have to pretend indifference to study 
in order to stand well with his fellows ! Mr. Owen 
Wister, the other day at Harvard, told his audi- 
ence how he now regrets that in college he did 
not feel like associating with "grinds." 

Then the relation of students to members of the 
faculty. In that same false atmosphere of boyish 
sentiment the faculty seems to be the natural 
enemy. To "polish the shoes of the professor" 
is about the lowest depth of offending to which 
a man can sink, and has a name that carries more 
ignominy than any other epithet heard on any 
campus ; yet it seems a natural thought that the 
professor should be the student's best friend. 
True, the office itself does not make him so. 
Friendship must still depend upon qualities of 
heart and nature. The professor must be mag- 
netic if he would be attractive. It is entirely pos- 
sible that in individual cases, members of the fac- 



FREAKS OF COLLEGE SENTIMENT 153 

ultj may lack genuine sympathy with student 
life, or may have personal qualities of disposition 
or character that make intimate relations with 
them quite undesirable, but the whole situation — 
the very purpose of their association — suggests 
that the student should find in his intercourse 
with his teacher the best fruits of helpful friend- 
ship. Is he free to seek that friendship? Is in- 
timacy with the professor entirely safe? Can a 
student show more than decent courtesy to his 
professor without incurring the odium of "polish- 
ing shoes" — as though he were seeking favor by 
some shallow fraud? 

Perhaps I overstate the situation. I certainly 
do if we have in mind only this college. Per- 
sonal relations are surely very pleasant here, but 
in college life generally, intercourse between stu- 
dents and members of the faculty goes little be- 
yond the class-room and official college business — 
a loss to both student and teacher. Indeed, in 
this relation the professor needs the student as 
much as the student the professor. Least of all 
should they be kept apart by any false or freak- 
ish sentiment or by any misconception of the re- 
lations in which they stand. 



IIAX 

WHAT THE PEWS REQUIRE OF THE 
PULPIT 

The speaker said, in part, the pew requires in 
general of the pulpit the highest form of pru- 
dence. Our American poet-philosopher tells us 
there are three levels of prudence ; I may not give 
his exact words, but his thought is something 
like this : On the first level are those who ap- 
preciate the utility of the symbol. That is com- 
mon sense; and these get health and wealth and 
all material good. On the second level are those 
who appreciate the beauty of the symbol. This 
is taste, and these get jesthetic enjoyment and 
culture and knowledge. On the third level they 
know the value of that which is signified by the 
symbol. That is spiritual insight; and these get 
reality. 

That is why we require this highest form of 
prudence of the pulpit. We want reality. We 
do so hunger for certainties — to stand upon the 
rock, and have no shifting sands under our feet. 
There is no realm in which we are so much en- 
titled to this experience and feeling of solidity 
9,§ in the realm of spiritual truth. Scientific 
154 



The pew and the pulpit 155 

truth may come into question, we may lose con- 
fidence in our social or political progress, but woe 
to us if we have not from the pulpit a clear and 
ringing note upon the eternal verities. Let Hy- 
menffins and Philetus and the other teachers of 
error say what they please so long as you breth- 
ren stand and say from your hearts what Paul 
said to Timothy — "Nevertheless the foundation 
of God standeth sure." 

In your ministration of this truth, of course 
our requirements are high, for we have our ideals. 
But in this you are not alone. Every worker 
must confront a comparison of his work with 
that of the ideal worker in his department. 

If it is true that the preacher cannot preach 
too well, it is equally true that the teacher can- 
not teach too well, nor the physician heal too well ; 
and there is a sense in which the life and work of 
the engineer, the farmer and the carpenter make 
drafts upon them which require better than their 
best. They cannot be too diligent, too accurate, 
too sagacious, or too manly. No man ever did 
a work that required skill, too skillfully; that re- 
quired watchfulness, with too much vigilance ; 
that required fidelity, with too much faithfulness. 

Your work, however, is unlike that of other call- 
ings in the ideals of its spiritual quality and its 
high motive. Men may be conceited in other work 
if they must — be well pleased with the way they 
sing or play or sell goods or write books or plead 
law, but the message of God's love passes from 



156 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

simple heart to simple heart, and only through 
the medium of absolute sincerity. 

So much for quality; now as to quantity. I 
used to think that our modern inability to endure 
long sermons was a proof of degeneracy. I am 
not so sure of that now. Nor is it so very mod- 
ern. George II used to say of the fifteen minute 
discourses of Bishop Newton — "Good short ser- 
mons." And he brought the bishop to that limit 
by frankly telling him that after listening fifteen 
minutes he was liable to take cold. 

But sermons used to be long, as though for 
discipline. I have even caught curious hints that 
the pulpit took a strange kind of pleasure in the 
weariness of the pew, as in the case of the Scotch 
clergyman who, being asked if it did not make 
him tired to preach so long, replied, "Na, na. 
I'm no tired ; but it wad do your heart guid whiles 
to see how tired the folk get." 

"Can he sit," says the stern covenanter in "Old 
Mortality," "can he sit six hours on the damp hill- 
side, listening to a sermon ?" Implying that if he 
can, then he stands the critical test. 

But, brethren of the pulpit, if it were a ques- 
tion of discipline, we now have other tests of en- 
durance, and you need not burden yourselves with 
that responsibility. So much the worse for you 
perhaps ; for it is easier to make a long sermon 
than a short one if, in the ease of the short one, 
what it lacks in length must be made up in point 
and power. It is easy to string out formal 



THE PEW AND THE PULPIT 157 

treatises on theology — one hour or two ; but if you 
are stating God's vital truth, and in such a way 
that every word feels the living touch of your own 
experience, ten minutes is a good while to talk. If 
you are saying, not something about the truth 
as you have read or heard it, but the truth itself 
as you know it, as you feel it, and as you are 
trying to live it, ten minutes, brethren, is a good 
while to talk. 

I think we require too much if we expect three 
such sermons a week. That task is beyond the 
capacity of the average man. A man like John 
Wesley could do it and even more — fifteen ser- 
mons a week on the average for fifty years, and 
never weary ; but he was a man of peculiar power 
and vitality. 

I was speaking to a group of clergymen lately 
upon this point and asking them how they accom- 
plished such feats of labor. "By being method- 
ical in my work," answered one. That seemed 
significant and yet required further explanation, 
which was promptly forthcoming. "By being 
methodical; that is, I have a method, and my 
method is to preach one old sermon each Sunday." 

And why not? I've heard many a sermon which 
I would like to hear again and again. 

The pew should require of the pulpit nothing 
which will prevent the pulpit from making ju- 
dicious use of its past studies. 



XVIII 
EZEKIEL'S WATCHMAN 

Ezekiel xxxiii: 1-7. 

The situation contemplated is military, but is 
instantly turned by the prophet to a spiritual ap- 
plication — the perils of wickedness. Men in sin 
must be faithfully warned. We must plead with 
them to turn from their evil ways. 

Not all are watchmen — only one. "If the peo- 
ple of the land take a man of their coasts and set 
him for their watchman." Yet if we know the 
lost condition of men without God, how can we 
withhold the service of warning? If we know 
what deliverance is ; if we know the wretchedness 
and perils of men unsaved ; if we know how human 
destinies hang in the balance, quivering, and that 
a touch, a word may open some man's heart to 
the message of God, how can we withhold the word 
of warning.? Each disciple must let his light 
shine; each must in his own way do his part to 
rouse men, and point them to the way of safety. 

But the regularly constituted watchman, the 

minister of God, is set apart in a special way and 

has fearful responsibilities. 

We should not urge men to enter the ministry ; 
158 



EZEKIEL'S WATCHMAN 159 

we should rather urge them not to do so. If 
God's call is upon them, they cannot be turned 
aside. "Necessity is laid upon me," said Paul, 
"woe is unto me if I preach not the gospel." If 
God's call is not upon them, they should by all 
means be dissuaded. 

What the call is I cannot tell. You that have 
heard it know best. Judging from what I have 
seen I might venture to say that it is not piety, 
however fervent. Nor is it the gift of speech, 
however fluent. Words are nothing. Men can 
multiply words without knowledge. Far more 
likely that slowness of speech would be a sign of 
the call; for this message must be put in words 
carefully chosen. The great truth must be sim- 
ply and briefly told. 

The mightiest of God's ministers, Moses, was 
reluctant to accept his mission from this very 
mistake of supposing that a glib tongue was nec- 
essary. "I am of slow speech and of a slow 
tongue" he said. "And the Lord said unto him, 
who hath made man's mouth . . . Go, and I 
will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou 
shalt say." 

Speaking as we must from the human side, an 
important element of the call would seem to be an 
appreciation of the need of this service. That 
men are lost in sin, and that human life as we 
commonly live it is full of vanity are facts that 
must come very vividly before your mind and 
press upon your heart with such a burden that 



160 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

you cannot restrain your hand from the task of 
plucking brands as from the burning. And you 
must know well the remedy, God's love in Christ. 
You must know it not as a theory, but as a fact, 
that has brought abounding joy and comfort to 
your own heart. 

Then, as to qualifications. In this record they 
are vigilance and fidelity. By implication there 
must he a strong sound body, for there is much 
hardness to endure. There must be a keen well- 
trained mind, for you must think with precision 
and if possible with force. These divine themes 
must be firmly held. Grasp them well and tighten 
your grip at every step in your discourse, for it 
is only by such treatment that the profound truths 
of scripture are adequately opened to the intelli- 
gence of hearers. 

We note I think too frequently in pulpit work, 
the lack of this firm and manly grip. The theme 
is a grand one, it opens with fair promise, but 
the thread of a great truth is presently lost, the 
fabric of the discourse falls flabby and at length 
unravels so that at the end there is nothing for 
us to carry home. 

Then as to the motive, it must be love of the 
Master and love of men. There must be no self 
in this work. In any man's pulpit work, the mo- 
ment it appears that what he is doing is in the 
nature of a performance, and that he is con- 
sciously prominent in it as a performer, from that 
moment his influence with us in divine things is 



EZEKIEL'S WATCHMAN 161 

dead. We may admire his rhetoric, his language, 
his gestures, but his truth, even if he speak the 
truth, has lost its ring and falls flat. In this 
work any affectation whether of feeling or of vir- 
tue is abominable. 

If the bush burns before you and you turn aside 
to see why it is not consumed, there will come to 
you from the midst of the bush, the words, "Draw 
not nigh hither ; put off^ thy shoes from off 
thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest 
is holy ground." And you will hide your 
face. 

I must not shrink from talking to you very 
frankly about this and would have you examine 
yourselves very carefully. Does it seem to you 
that you do well in God's service.'^ Your fervor, 
your unction, your eloquence — do they seem to 
justify a reasonable complaisance? Does the 
gospel message seem to gather some momentum 
from you and your method? Face that error 
frankly, and correct it. If you cannot correct it, 
then be seriously counseled to choose some other 
work. 

A kindred thought is the danger of a profes- 
sional manner in what you do in this service. 
There are professional traditions in the pulpit 
that have great influence ; there are certain ex- 
ercises to be gone through again and again. 
Repetition and habit may lead to formality. But 
the message must come every time warm and di- 
rect from your heart. The burden of each 



162 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

prayer as though it were the first you ever carried 
to the throne; each word of exhortation with the 
freshness of your first appeal to dying men. 

These are great truths with which you have 
to do. Momentous interests are involved in the 
immortal nature and destiny of your fellow men. 
Do you fully realize it? Do these truths touch 
your hearts? If they do, speak an honest word 
to us, a sincere word, right to the point, and 
straight from your convictions. Do that and 
we will go to hear you. We will go through rain 
and fire and flood to hear you. 

There is no call that so appeals to the deep 
and conscious needs of men as the call to repent 
for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. John 
preached it and the people flocked out to hear 
him. Many of his hearers he called a generation 
of vipers. He said the ax must be laid unto the 
root of the tree, and that the fact that Abraham 
was their father would do them no good ; yet they 
crowded out to hear him, all Jerusalem, all Judea, 
and the regions round about Jordan. 

Be not discouraged, brethren, though men 
harden their hearts and seem not to hear. Only 
speak a sincere word of warning and of hope, and 
the busiest man in Wall street will quit his gains 
and bend his ear to your voice. Elijah was dis- 
couraged and went into the wilderness, sent then, 
to the mountain, where he saw exhibitions of 
power — wind, fire, and earthquake, but God's real 
power came in less boisterous form, and he was 



EZEKIEL'S WATCHMAN 163 

cheered and sent on his high errand. Seven thou- 
sand had not bowed the knee to Baal. 

The voice of the soul will be heard, and that 
voice is, "Give me the bread of life." 



XIX 

HOW SHALL I GIVE THEE UP, EPHRAIM? 

Hosea xi: 8. 

No thought here of an attempt to tell us what 
the love of God is, but a glimpse of the very love 
itself — a kind of appealing picture of affection ! 
Nothing subtle or complicated about it — ^just a 
simple exhibition of a sublime love quite intelli- 
gible to us because it is so like the healthy action 
of human feeling. 

Like and yet unlike; for in the next verse, the 
ninth, we have this withholding of anger explained 
by the statement, "For I am God and not man." 
There appear notable differences of action as com- 
pared with what man would probably do. In 
dealing with the wayward we are very ready to 
suspect, to blame, to rebuke, to accuse, to con- 
vict, to punish. We have a feeling that the wicked 
and the criminal should be cast out. Even if we 
try to exhort and win the wayward back we soon 
reach the limits of our patience. 

But God cherishes the wayward and holds them 
in love. God lingers over them with patient ten- 
derness. It is just this quality of divine love that 

I wish you to think of this morning. 
164 



HOW SHALL I GIVE THEE UP? 165 

There is no fact in this world that has greater 
value for us in our personal life than this clinging 
tenderness of God's love for us. "How shall I 
give thee up!" 

Of the love of God in general we are told here 
and there; it is brought to us in providence — 
some event that opens up the goodness of God 
to men ; or in personal experience — some fine touch 
of divine grace in the inner life of which we could 
not adequately speak even if it were not too sacred 
to be the subject of remark. Then the words of 
the book about God's love. We like to turn to 
the golden text (John iii, 16) "God so loved the 
world that he gave his only begotten son that 
whosoever believeth in him should not perish but 
have everlasting life." "The gift" you say. 
Nay, the gift is incidental — only as the measure 
of the love. God so loved — that he gave. — ^Noth- 
ing can surpass the simple sweetness of that mes- 
sage. It lingers on human lips and is imprinted 
upon human hearts. We can't improve it by en- 
largement. Glowing narrative adds nothing to it, 
oratory nothing, the vivid reenactment of the 
crucifixion — the nails and the arms outspread and 
the spear — all its cruelties and horrors, the 
passion play itself; in fact these may fall rather 
flat upon the ear, because they may become con- 
ventional, but this little message "God so loved the 
world" — is the real thing. It holds us with its 
own charm. 

Yet in matters of the spirit a full statement 



166 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

often has less appealing power than a mere sug- 
gestion, because a suggestion is a challenge to 
the lightning quality of imaginative thought. 
You have noticed that a stroke of mere outline 
will be instantly filled out to its full form by the 
imagination. Listen to a dozen pages upon 
mother's love, — ^all very good, but some significant 
act of motherly affection which you happen to see, 
will better open up the depths of that love to you 
than all that text. 

"How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? — mine 
heart is turned within me, my repentings are kin- 
dled together." As though there were a mighty 
struggle between love and justice — a debate — and 
love wins in the argument ! A fine intuition of 
the prophet which gives a picture of the very at- 
titude of divine tenderness so beautifully and 
touchingly humanized, yet divine in the essence 
and power of it. How patient it is ! How tender 
and strong ! "How shall I give thee up ?" 

Anger would suggest instant judgment. Jus- 
tice with her fair claims would cut the offender 
off at once. But no emotion of anger can divert 
this purpose of love ; no claim of Justice can neu- 
tralize it. 

Think for a moment who Ephraim was, — a 
tribe mighty but haughty and jealous, so eminent 
in numbers, in advantages and in guilt that the 
prophet could say "Israel" and mean Ephraim, or 
say "Ephraim" and mean all Israel. 

That tribe entered upon the fairest portion of 



HOW SHALL I GIVE THEE UP? 167 

the land of promise, but its history is a sad story 
of descent from this high place, through dissention 
and distrust and ungodliness and idolatry — ever 
downward, a sad picture of opportunities wasted 
and personal gifts abused, a history of sin and 
decay and dissolution. So the message of the 
prophet is a message about sin and judgment and 
love. 

The sin is the sin of infidelity to love, often, as 
in Hosea, presented under the figure of adultery, 
the most heinous of sins. We are left to conclude 
that it were better for Ephraim to have lived out 
in darkness with no knowledge of God, than hav- 
ing had the light, to turn back to darkness. 

Then the judgment upon this infidelity — not a 
stroke of God inflicted upon a man as apart from 
his sin. The judgment is the working out of the 
sin itself. Infidelity can lead nowhere save to the 
unutterable darkness of pollution. 

But through all and over all and after all, the 
song of God's love ! The notes of it rise above 
every other note of these messages and in every 
note a prophecy of triumph, because love will pre- 
vail. That triumph will come through suffering, 
but love is willing to suff^er ; through long waiting 
— no matter, Ephraim may count upon the pa- 
tience of God ; the victory will cost, but love never 
counts the cost to be estopped by it. Right on- 
ward moves love and her song is a song of won- 
drous sweetness and of wondrous power. 

What a comfort for us in this appeal of divine 



168 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

affection! For us, — for we are like Ephraim, in 
the hardness of our hearts, in our indifference to 
the ordinary calls and obligations of the higher 
life; and this message is to us, not that we may 
merely contemplate the greatness of the love of 
God, but that we may yield ourselves to it, that 
we may come under the spell of its searching qual- 
ity, that we may know the power of it as a motive 
to righteousness. 

Is there not something in that loving appeal 
that tugs at our hearts? "How shall I let thee 
Go?" No attitude could be more winning than 
this yearning tenderness. 

Real love cannot give up its object, and the ob- 
ject itself, when it becomes aware of that love 
comes under an influence that it cannot long re- 
sist. 

We easily resist other appeals. It is amazing 
how men can resist satire for example, with its fine 
home thrusts — a very ready weapon, keen, even 
venomous, if you please, hurled in bitterness and 
with unerring aim ; but they at whom it is aimed 
are untouched. Men seem to be provided with an 
armor of conceit, or self-complaisance that turns 
away the shafts of satire, so that they fall broken 
and harmless at the feet of him whom they would 
wound. Sarcasm cuts and hurts both him that 
gives and him that gets it, but it heals neither. 

It is somewhat the same with law with its hard 
requirements, — the same I mean, with reference 
to any winning appeal to the spirits of men. 



HOW SHALL I GIVE THEE UP? 169 

You can't win men by legal enactment to sobriety 
or purity or any virtue. Rebuke? You can't re- 
buke a man into the spirit of obedience. You 
can't denounce a man into the kingdom of peace 
and righteousness. Thundering commands and 
threats and penalties — in the waywardness of our 
stubborn hearts we stand unmoved by these, may 
even sneer at them in our indifference ; but if a 
man love us we yield to that at last. We may 
hold out long, but love suffereth long and is kind. 
Love never faileth. That enduring tenderness 
that has the divine touch of patience — if you find 
that the warm currents of it keep flowing into 
your life you'll respond to it some day or you 
are not a man. And that is the mighty hope of 
our race, that men will, must, come to know the 
love of God. "I drew them with the cords of a 
man" says Hosea, "with the bands of love" i. e. 
with all gentle means such as are suited to man's 
temper, to allure him, as it were, to obedience, 
laying hands upon him gently, to draw him into 
the right way. 

True, that even under these circumstances men 
are often obstinate. We persist in error after 
we have become aware of the error. Even Paul 
yielded reluctantly to the drawings of God's love. 
It drew upon him through conscience. Paul was 
a conscientious Pharisee, building therefore upon 
the observance of the law ; but candidly, in his 
own heart he knew he was not measuring up to 
the requirements of God's law, hence the stings 



170 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

of conscience; yet he persisted. He even in- 
creased the cruelty of his persecutions, "breathing 
out," as we read, "threatenings and slaughter 
against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high 
priest and desired of him letters to Damascus," 
that he might bring bound to Jerusalem any 
Christians he might find there. So when his vis- 
ion came he is still making that futile resistance. 

The Master knowing well the stubbornness of 
his human temper said, "It is hard for thee to 
kick against the goads ;" a homely figure, of the 
goaded ox and under the irritation of that sting 
he kicks back only to get a deeper thrust of the 
same goad. So we may learn not only the patient 
continuance of the love of God, but its increasing 
effectiveness. 

Note again who it is whom God loves — 
Ephraim ! Of whom it is said, "Ephraim com- 
passeth me about with lies." "Ephraim feedeth 
on wind and followeth after the East wind. He 
daily increaseth lies and desolation." The marvel 
is that God can so love Ephraim the unlovely. 

Our human affection offers but slight sug- 
gestion of the breadth and power of this love. 
We are narrowed by petty limitations in our love, 
by prejudices of race and condition and distance. 
What care we for China and the Chinese, or for 
the swarthy races of the dark continent.? Really, 
I mean, really? 

It would be folly to deny, as I am certainly not 
here to deny, the possibility of a broad, unselfish 



HOW SHALL I GIVE THEE UP? ITl 

and generous human affection and the fact of 
zealous benevolence on the part of God's good- 
children. The flaming heart is no idle symbol. 

At times there comes a great soul on fire with 
this zeal and wields a mighty power, marshaling 
the agencies of benevolence, so that under the 
spirit of God and by his blessing there dawns 
upon a whole continent the promise of regenera- 
tion ; as upon Africa under the inspiration of the 
noble work of David Livingstone. The wilderness 
rejoices and the islands are made glad, as the New 
Hebrides under the ministrations of Dr. John 
Paton. 

We rally to these standards as best we can, in 
missionary effort — too often with a lack-luster 
zeal, a kind of faint and fad-like sentiment, God 
forgive us ! Where we lack is in affection and the 
power of it. We demand touch and eyesight, 
neighborhood and in it, beauty and grace and 
culture, congeniality of tastes — qualities that are 
agreeable. Toward people of that kind and un- 
der such circumstances we can at least keep up a 
fair pretense of kindness ; but the outlying multi- 
tudes of the unattractive and the disagreeable, 
the thousands that are huddled together in want 
often and in forbidding and unsanitary condi- 
tions in the dark places of great cities ; and the 
millions in distant lands, remote from us not only 
by distance, but in civilization and mode of life — 
what care we for them.? 

The orient might be wiped off the map and all 



172 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

the slums submerged at a stroke and their re- 
moval hardly touch our lives by the vibration of 
a thought or an interest or an affection. Their 
absence would not quicken or retard a pulse of 
our throbbing life ! 

I speak of this not as matter of rebuke to 
ourselves, though it might well be so, but to aid 
us in getting a conception of the love of God, 
the greatness of which we fail to grasp if we cling 
too closely to the feeble analogies of our human 
affection. 

God loves Ephraim ! The love of God goes out 
in its abundance to the lowest and the meanest 
and the most unpromising. It does not pry about 
and feel its way here and there among men, cau- 
tiously selecting this one and that one because 
some excellence appears in them that is worthy of 
love. It pours itself with increasing flow upon 
those that are unworthy as it seems to us, and Lo ! 
those unworthy lives are illumined into beauty, if 
we await the full measure of God's work. 

This is the point we must not fail to note, 
there is after all a worthiness in Ephraim — in the 
possibilities of his spiritual betterment ; but it 
took the father's eye to see that worthiness and 
it will take the love of the father's heart to 
quicken it, and bring Ephraim forward to right- 
eousness. 

As the sun pours its radiance on the cold areas 
of the north, not because there's beauty in them, — 
for they are dark and bleak — ^but because there is 



HOW SHALL I GIVE THEE UP? 173 

light and warmth in the sun ; and these dark for- 
ests are illumined by it and are at length brought 
into verdure and goodly fruitage. 

The love of God is creative. The hope of the 
world lies here — a magnificent basis for jubilant 
optimism — that the creative spirit of love is sov- 
ereign in the world ; that at the center of power 
there is a loving father employing the resources 
of infinite wisdom to uplift our human life. A 
love with power. Not a love that may be at any- 
time interpreted as approval of the sinner; not 
good nature, mere idle fondness ; not that frail 
and impotent feeling that spends itself in feeble 
emotion as of an overindulgent human parent; 
but a love that endures, that has in it energy and 
tension— like a grip of steel, that can administer 
stings and sufferings as well as joys, whatever 
may be necessary to make the object more worthy. 
A renewing and vitalizing power. 

Notice the working of it in the story of the 
prodigal son. I like to think of that boy as go- 
mg home not because he was hungry but under the 
tension of the father's love for him, a love which 
he at length remembers and realizes again. It 
pulls him. The story has many turns of inter- 
esting incident, but the undertone of the whole 
is the greatness of the father's love. Read that 
into every phrase of the narrative of his disobedi- 
ence and wandering. "He took his journey, 

wasted his substance — began to be in want." 
Through all the father loves him. Dazed by dis- 



174 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

tracting pleasures he forgets it or loses the con- 
sciousness of it for a time, but in the intervals 
of memory it is there — the father's love. Little 
by little it comes back to him ^nd at last he 
"comes to himself." 

All this time the father's love has been tugging 
at his heart and his hunger is now the hunger of 
the heart. The tension of his father's love has 
made a permanent force into the currents of which 
he might have thrown himself at any time. That 
love has never wholly lost its power over him and 
now it asserts itself again with sufficient force 
to win his will. And note the attitude of the 
waiting father. He knows the boy will come back. 
He watches for him with eyes that have in them 
a light that will never fail even though the eyes 
themselves be darkened. He sees his son coming 
"when he is yet a great way off." 

Now there are for us two lessons here which 
I can state in a word; first; every wayward lad 
is somebody's son and if we would help to bring 
him back to his better life we can only do so by 
loving him. Secondly — for ourselves, to remem- 
ber God's tender love for us in all our wandering 
and disobedience. That memory will be worth 
everything to us. If we believe that Ephraim will 
come back it is because we know that God, in the 
tenderness of his love, yearned over him and said: 
"How shall I give thee up, Ephraim.?" 



XX 

THE NOISE OF THEM THAT SING 

And he said, It is not the voice of them that shout for 

mastery, neither is it the voice of them that cry for being 

overcome; but the noise of them that sing do I hear. — 
Exodus xxxii, 18. 

Moses says this in a tone that implies intense 
disapproval. Not that there is anything wrong 
in singing except where it denotes a collapse of 
effort, the fatal letting down of life from strenu- 
ous and honorable endeavor. 

Moses detected that in this abandoned gayety 
of the people, the letting down, the yielding from 
the hard purpose upon which this whole enter- 
prise of getting out of Egypt and out of slavery, 
was based. This very deliverance was the mission 
of Moses. He knew its magnitude, its difficulties ; 
he was strengthened for it by more than a com- 
mon insight, being admitted to the very presence 
of God. He knew therefore, the significance of 
this fatal weakness of the people. Blind of heart, 
stubborn, faltering in courage, they would follow 
their leader when that meant an immediate relief 
from present hardship, but as soon as new hard- 
ships were encountered they murmured. Hunger 
175 



176 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

and thirst brought to mind all the comforts of 
their former condition, and they longed for them 
with that easy abandonment of aspiration and 
hope, which you will always find in weak and self- 
indulgent natures. They break down under 
slight burdens. Thirst brings down the price of 
the best and greatest things if we are offered 
water for them. 

Hunger cheapens the countless blessings of a 
birthright until a bowl of pottage is held to be a 
good price for it. "Behold I am at the point to 
die," says Esau, "and what profit shall this birth- 
right do to me.?" 

The argument seems fair ; but there is a fatal 
fallacy in it that death is an evil. The stomach 
always thinks so and argues upon that presump- 
tion with a cogency that it is hard to resist. 
The stomach is a good talker, keeping up the 
clamor of its demands; but it never listens. "It 
is a hard thing, my fellow citizens," said old Cato, 
"to talk to the belly, for the belly hath no ears." 
But men are more than mere stomach, and the 
function of reason and reflection is to give a fair 
court, in which the expediences of life are to be 
decided. These questions come up, of course, and 
they must be decided, but to do it fairly, not only 
to listen to the voice of hunger and consider the 
pottage, but to consider the birthright as well, to 
weigh death ; to weigh the value of heroic determi- 
nation, the value of consistency in maintaining 
an honorable purpose. 



NOISE OF THEM THAT SING 177 

What this people lacked was steadfastness of 
conviction — so easily turned aside from the sure 
pathway of obedience and hope ! It cut Moses to 
the soul to catch the first evidences of it in these 
thoughtless revelings. How could these people 
so soon forget that God who alone could guide 
them through the perils of their wilderness 
journey? So do not for a moment suppose that 
this dashing the tablets down and breaking them 
was an act of momentary petulance or passion. 
Rather it was a righteous indignation, a pro- 
found regret that lasted a lifetime, because he 
realized the painful fact of their weakness. He 
knew what it meant in the years of struggle that 
were before them, and he knew how to deal with 
it. Such weakness brings its natural penalty, — 
to be forever cut off from the promise — that is, 
simply to draw the curtain and close the future 
from them. 

But there was a remnant that could be schooled 
to obedience. It was a heroic discipline. They 
must take it, however. Their idol was ground to 
powder and the people were made to drink the 
dust of that bovine gold. Then the summons 
went forth: "Who is on the Lord's side?" And 
when a small part of them had gathered about 
Moses, the sons of Levi passed through the rest 
with reeking sword, filling their camp with blood 
and horror. That is what it comes to when 
wisdom calls and has in her voice the sanc- 
tions of visible authority. That is what it 



178 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

means to us whether the penalty comes on the in- 
stant, or is delayed till the end of our genera- 
tion. 

And this lesson is for us, brethren, for us, who 
should go straight on in the narrow way, shrink- 
ing from no duties because they are hard. We 
need to be reminded of the perils of our weakness, 
the tendency to slip from under severer tasks, to 
shift the burden of thought, the burden of labor, 
the burden of a purpose steadily maintained, to 
yield to methods that invite and that promise 
easier ways — or to indulgence, that fatal snare of 
industry — to yield and slip into singing and 
dancing. 

"Not the voice of them that shout for mastery, 
neither is it the voice of them that cry for being 
overcome, but the noise of them that sing do I 
hear." 

These "voices" and "noises" here mentioned are 
the sounds that measure the quality of human en- 
deavor. 

The voice of hard and persistent effort — ^when 
men hold steadily to their course — there is a tonic 
in the very note of it, and there come moments of 
exhilaration when the battle is on and victory is 
in sight, the pulse beats high, hope flaunts her 
banners, and the eager host breaks forth in shouts 
of triumph. 

Then there is the cry of those who are over- 
come, not a glad cry, but of the same quality; 
for even an honorable cause must meet its defeats. 



NOISE OF THEM THAT SING 179 

Nor is one or ten or a hundred defeats a proof 
of wrong. 

The hum of common industry is of this quality 
too, and is in fact a song of triumph. Although 
it has not that resonance of hearty acclaim which 
rings forth from the battlefield, it is a pasan of 
victory and has more solid gladness in it than any 
other sound; for in it are mingled the harmonies 
of health, and hope, and home, and honor. 

But beside every seat of industry there is a 
nestling brood of the idle. Here are those who 
would shirk duty, throw off the harness of toil 
and slip away into the easy course of dalliance 
and singing. 

By every hard fought Waterloo there is a Bel- 
gium's capitol with its "beauty circle proudly 
gay" within sound of the cannon's opening roar, 
and many are there in festivity who ought to be 
in the fight. The hand of judgment is lifted 
against such dalliance. 

You can readily see that I am not decrying any 
particular form of pleasure, but the substitution 
of pleasure as such for the serious pursuits and 
purposes of manhood. We do not develop as we 
should that true and strong capacity to persevere 
in the way of achievement, though that way be 
steep and rugged. 

"We are a mere number," says Horace, "born 
to consume the fruits of the earth." Horace is 
speaking of Homer and the Homeric ideals of life, 
the splendid endurance of Ulysses, the beautiful 



180 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

constancy of Penelope, but over against these are 
the suitors of Penelope, mere drones, and the 
dainty subjects of Alcinous, and we are like them 
a mere number born to consume the fruits of the 
earth, busied more than we should be in pamper- 
ing our precious bodies. Horace thinks the 
Homeric ideal is the true one. 

Let me say right here that the reward of such 
heroic achievement is rest and recreation, singing 
and dancing if you please, pleasure if you please, 
pleasure to which the sated Sybarite can never 
rise for it comes as a result, not as an end sought. 

Let me give you an example. In the earlier 
stages of this same Exodus, great faith and en- 
durance were required of the people from time to 
time. At the very outset they came down that 
valley to the seaside, the enemy in pursuit of 
them; and there they were, the sea before them, 
a mountain on either hand and a foe pressing upon 
them from behind. The word from the Lord was 
that they go forward. Go forward! With those 
seemingly impassable barriers ! Yet forward they 
must go, and as they did so, the barriers were 
taken away, they walked through the sea, and 
when the enemy followed them, they were over- 
whelmed by the refluent waters, — that was a time 
of gladness and of song ; and so we have it in the 
record; then sang Moses and the children of 
Israel, this song unto the Lord and spoke, say- 
ing: "I will sing unto the Lord for he has tri- 
umphed gloriously, the horse and his rider hath 



NOISE OF THEM THAT SING 181 

he thrown into the sea" — ^there Is a song for you. 
And Miriam, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel 
in her hand and all the women went out after her 
with timbrels and with dances — there is dancing 
for you. 

Talk of pleasure ! who can tell the exquisite de- 
light that thrilled the people on the occasion of so 
signal an achievement? 

Legitimate activity whets the appetite for that 
pleasure which comes as a reward. The very 
activity is pleasure for that matter, the more 
keenly felt as the pulse beats strong with exercise, 
and the faculties are alert and attuned to the play 
of helpful emotion. The wearied votary of pleas- 
ure is a stranger to that fresh and buoyant joy. 

I spoke of shrinking from burdens of thought. 
That opens another aspect of our subject. It is 
pitiful to note that intellectual and moral flabbi- 
ness which shrinks from the task of answering 
life's questions, because the answer isn't at once 
forthcoming. We cannot prove on the instant 
that the soul is immortal, we cannot demonstrate, 
in the scientific sense of demonstration, that there 
is a God. We have our instincts, our intuitions 
and even our reasons, but these do not pass in the 
laboratories of science. 

Now if a youth is unfortunate enough to come 
into doubt upon these or similar questions, you 
may not bring him conviction by quoting a text 
to him or by tripping through the forms of logic, 
or in his own case by any special siege of close 



182 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

and hard thinking. Such problems have to be 
lived with. They are solved only by working 
them out and living them out. Obedience, with 
reference to these great doctrines of revelation, is 
the true solvent of incertitude. "If any man will 
do his will he shall know of the doctrine whether 
it be of God." 

Our best answer to life's problems come with 
life's last crown. The heritage of gray hairs, 
what Lowell calls "that autumnal wisdom ripe and 
placid," is this very certitude upon matters which 
have been the lifelong questionings of the heart, 
a certitude which may still be confirmed by our last 
experiences and best insights. 

But if a youth winces under such burdens of 
thought, and wants to throw them oif, if at his 
first defeat when thought is baffled, as it surely 
will be, he gives up, or takes up the easiest theory 
which presents itself as an alternative, that is bad. 
A very large share of the unbelief of men repre- 
sents the cheap despair into which they sink when 
they realize the difficulty of these problems, and 
they stray off after other gods or glide into an 
easy indifference. How many men are simply in- 
different upon these subjects because they can not 
immediately answer all the hard questions that 
arise in connection with them. 

That is what happened here in this narrative. 
Moses delayed his return, that is all. It was only 
a period of waiting, and those people should have 
been capable of that much faith in their leader, 



NOISE OF THEM THAT SING 183 

if not in the God he represented. But no ! before 
many days they gathered themselves together 
unto Aaron and said unto him : "Up ! make us 
Gods who shall go before us." "As for this 
Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land 
of Egypt, we wot not what has become of him." 

Then came the earrings and then the golden 
calf. Any little visible thing would do for them 
to worship, so incapable were they of grasping and 
holding to a spiritual truth. And the words of 
God to Moses were : "They have corrupted them- 
selves, they have turned aside quickly out of the 
way which I have commanded them," and the form 
which their lapse took was idolatry and feasting 
and levity. "They sat down to eat and drink 
and rose up to play." 

Now I can anticipate your criticism upon this 
line of thought — that life in this aspect of it is 
too forbidding, too severe and hard, unrelieved by 
mirth and pleasure. This world of ours is al- 
ready too somber, there is so much suffering, 
wrong, evil, so much hardship, a good deal of 
darkness, and that we ought to let in all the light, 
aU the relief, all the joy that we can. I know 
how true that is, and would add to, rather than 
subtract from, any real relief and help that man 
and woman can get in bearing their burdens. 

I see plainly how blessed a gift it is to be able 
to endure all things with a cheerful and hopeful 
heart. But we must beware lest good cheer alone 
become our main purpose. We want so many 



184 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

easements of toil; there is such a passion for fun 
and hilarity, — the ease of it, the lightness and ex- 
hilaration of it. The people are so fond of 
parades and masquerades and trivial diversions. 
If the world's work were done then we might set- 
tle down to enjoyment, fatal as that course would 
be to our true happiness ; but the world's work 
seems only begun. It is precisely because there 
is so much hardship, so much suffering, so many 
evils, such troops of black horses, on mountains 
of brass, because the kingdom of God is yet so 
far away from us that the serious business of life 
should take a deep hold upon us. 

I wonder sometimes what service they render 
in the providence of God, whose lives are devoted 
to pleasure, sipping here and there the sweets of 
diversion, flitting from scene to scene of gayety, 
with barely intervals enough to repair their 
shaken nerves or refresh their sated appetites. 
Relief, indeed ! It is often a relief to such when 
there comes an enforced period of quiet and absti- 
nence. I am convinced that in fashionable circles 
there is a powerful motive for the outward observ- 
ance of Lent in the sheer weariness of pleasure- 
seekers at that season, and that they may be re- 
freshed and ready for a new plunge when the 
days of abstinence are over; and that is one of 
the reasons why Lent is becoming an institution 
of society as well as an institution of the church. 

It would seem the manly thing to contend for 
that nbbler type of living that asks no questions 



NOISE OF THEM THAT SING 185 

about pleasure — that sets the face against it, if 
need be, in the firm pursuit of duty, pushing the 
legitimate enterprises of life toward accomplish- 
ment at whatever cost. Not that we are to banish 
all thought of reward; not that our reward shall 
be joyless. Indeed, there was joy in the motive 
of the Master himself, "Who for the joy that was 
set before him endured the cross despising the 
shame" — not a selfish pleasure, but the joy of 
doing the work and being able to say, "it is 
finished." 

I want to assure you again and again that the 
rewards will take care of themselves in any career 
that is actuated by noble purposes, and that is 
pursued with unflinching fidelity, and every good 
cause must be wrought to its success in that way, 
if our world is to be made better. Somebody 
must work, somebody must suffer, somebody must 
wait in apparent disappointment. 

Think what is being done and how strong and 
noble natures are waiting in the cause of temper- ^*V*7 
ance! To prevent cruelty to animals, e. g., what 
thankless labors through a whole generation to 
work up a public sentiment to get suitable laws 
passed and to get the means of enforcing them.? 
What opposition Mr. Bergh met, what buffetings, 
what sneers ! never faltering, however. It would 
have been easier to relax the fiber of that purpose 
and drift along with the world in indifference to 
suffering, but would the pleasure of such ease 
have been at all comparable to the profound satis- 



186 HUMANITIES IN EDUCATION 

faction of accomplishing so noble a purpose, and 
having the people whose hearts were made more 
tender by his ministry, rise up at last and call 
him blessed? 

Enterprises that enlist the affections and nobler 
human sentiments are sure of their reward in 
terms of satisfaction as profound and noble as 
are the sentiments themselves. There is a mag- 
nificent service in simple waiting. I wonder if 
that is not what is meant by "Waiting on the 
Lord." To wait on is to serve, primary to rest 
in expectation and hope. "They that wait 
on the Lord shall renew their strength." As the 
father waits for the return of the prodigal with 
misgivings of course, with fear, yet waiting, for 
at the first indication of his coming, when 
he is yet a great way off, the father is ready to 
go and meet him, to fall on his neck and kiss 
him. 

Or as the mother waits for the return of her 
roving sailor lad, — with a heavy heart at times 
it may be, but with a tenderness of longing that 
begets hope. She may grow pale and thin in 
waiting, but her keen eye never wearies, never 
does she lift it from the curved shore and the 
horizon over which his mast may climb, and though 
a thousand times she may fail to see him, every 
disappointment is the birth of a new hope. And 
if the good ship ever does come over the horizon, 
— if she ever does hold him to her heart in a lov- 
ing embrace, there is not a thrill of joy she feels, 



NOISE OF THEM THAT SING 187 

but she has felt it a thousand times by anticipa- 
tion. 

We cheapen life's true joys, we weaken life's 
true forces, if we are content with the superficial 
pleasures which appeal to our senses. 



11 1913 



